This is a second album from a pure-voiced, bright-eyed individual with a passion for big rock guitars and great pennant-streaming melody.
Only in America do the 48 channel desks get so many rich-toned instruments powering their well-rehearsed riffs and fills into such finely balanced albums of lightly emotional songs.
I stand back in admiration, but feel a slight discomfort at not being able to rant and rave about the brilliance of it all. To be honest I feel a little alienated and a bit left out. As Ray Bradbury would never have said, the Machineries of Joy are too much in command for my skittering and indified sensibilities. What a wimp of a Brit I am sometimes. Great thumping drums and bass erect portentous foundations for great ziggurats of layered guitar and the D'Alessandro's ever-circling voice. It sure is big. Under torture I would admit to loving it a bit.
The songs themselves are uniformly secure. Ten songs and an interlude of arpeggios and vocal touches occupy a very decent 45 minutes.
The audience lined up in the sights seems to be mostly conservative-minded US College students who value quality product, a focus on individual lifestyle and uncomplicated heterosexual relationships with vocal harmonies and a warm feeling of mildly euphoric emotional fuzziness. I'm guessing here.
"I Thought I'd Be There" has the lines: "every day I have to live with myself / and I don’t know if I can / because every day I have to live with the shame / and the memory of the problems we had". This looks a bit edgy on the page. But in the big speakers it sounds smoothly romantic and yearning. As with sex in Friends, we are not given the whiff of body fluids, despite the coded hints. None of the notes or sounds ring "shame": they focus on lush, comforting and overpowering.
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"Everybody Loves You" takes a jerky step into something a little more Elvis Costello (perhaps). But where Costello writes songs about dilemmas that matter, this simpers a little about the attractive Lothario who our heroine (uniquely) notices as less than the charming guy seen by everyone else. He has, indeed, a devil in his eye. Whatever drama we had hoped for, we've got Hollyoaks.
The production is an object lesson in what you can do with well-played electric guitars – there's no innovation, but we are treated to a tour de force of tones and textures. "Silly Girl", the album closer, starts with a chorus effect that tears away into some flailing distortion and then adds a ringing chime of heroic riffing. It’s quite splendid. But the heart of the song's "I don’t care if I never see you again" doesn’t have the same power and vitality. "I hear your voice inside my brain, so condescending, so insane" is just a bit anticlimactic against that great wall of bursting sound.
The radio hit is likely to be opening track "Masquerade" that leaves more than a trace of memory, even on first play. All the considerable qualities (and uncertainties) of the whole album are encapsulated right there. www.myspace.com/dinadalesandro will give you a burst – but bear in mind that the CD sound is bigger and better.
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