If you’re a modestly comfortable young woman with no material worries, no immediate entangelments and no taste for rough and ready rock and roll, here’s your new favourite singer: JEN CHAPIN.
Jen is daughter of the late HARRY CHAPIN. She does some work for World Hunger Year, wears nice clothes and sits on expensive-looking furniture.
Jen also has a bunch of musical chums who can play a bit. Co-producer and bass player Stephan Crump collaborated as a duettist on JEN CHAPIN'S first album; he is also associated with the MAHAVISHNU PROJECT and other high-end jazz work. Drummer Dan Rieser is a member of MARCY PLAYGROUND and also shows up on recordings by NORAH JONES. Other session players have CVs that are nearly as cool. In that lush context, Chapin's edgy New York voice delivers matter-of-fact stories of an empty existence with an agreeable nasal twang – rather in the style of the grand old tradition of Carole King. The combination works pretty well.
Carole King apart, the earliest obvious reference point for this kind of intimate city-dweller music is JAMIS IAN. Known or not known to JEN CHAPIN, JANIS IAN made her observational hymns to fragile self-confidence and urban loneliness back in the 70s.
The collection on this album has 12 of Chapin's distinctive songs. Her stylish musician friends give them a light and sophisticated feel without any intrusive fussiness or dissonance. It’s not bland like DIDO, but it takes care to be house-trained, cool and soothing. Your reviewer's jaded ears struggled to find the fibre and substance to truly nourish the tormented soul, but less psychotic listeners will be pushing in front of Goldilocks to get their copies. It's just right, Mummy Bear.
|
Music credentials apart, I'm not wholly convinced by the lyrical content. Lets have a look at "Passive People". It goes: "We are passive people at the end of the day / We let the outrage melt away / It seems that life is much easier that way." This is not very strident social comment, for sure. But who is it getting at? Not me, buddy. Some mornings I could shit anger at the news of US Government lies about Iraq and the criminal English exploitation of migrant workers. Maybe it’s the people you hang out with Jen? People like the handsome dude in "Me Be Me" who lets you do whatever you want? Or the rich kid with his Michael Jordan T shirt and nagging mother? I don't know. They all seem like characters out of Friends, but with more money, no jokes and no cute mannerisms. If her degree in International Relations and study time in Mexico has given her fire in her belly, it doesn't come through that way in the songs.
So what am I saying here? This album could be massive. It is gloriously well produced. It slips down very nicely. Just like Bailey's, and not a million miles from NORAH JONES. It has open-ended emotional possibilities to soothe or commiserate with the lost or yearning parts of today's betrayed generation. There's no harm done if it’s Hugh Grant rather than Gregory Peck. It’s kind of SADE ADU for the noughties. A very smooth operation.
|
