This is the third album by Stockholm-based songwriter Johannes Mayer who is cursed with an accent free voice which sounds disconcertingly like Coldplay's Chris Martin.
More worrying still, his songs are similarly blighted by an overblown sensitivity as though written while locked away in a narrow, claustrophobic world of love and longing.
We first encounter him Wandering Through An Empty Field bemoaning how "nothing ever changes" and pining broken-heartedly "I still miss you so".
By the time he takes his leave, nine tracks later, Everything In Its Place does at least allow some measure of optimism promising "I'll meet you under the old oak that grows beside the river" which certainly has a more impressive ring to it than saying 'I'll see you down the pub'.
I often wonder if these singer's lives are really so filled with rapturous emotion in idyllic locations or whether this is just this the kind of ardent lovesick prose they think they must adopt to prove how passionate they are.
Look At You Now is the best song here because its breezier quality means it doesn't sound so cloying. It contrasts with the dried out spark of Forest Fire or the woe is me title track lamenting how much harder it is to be the one left behind.
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On Keep Calm he is clingy ("I will never let you go" while on Heavy Heart, he sounds positively suicidal ("give me some time and space") - sure signs that a dose of 'if you love someone set them free' philosophy is sorely needed.
Although this is very much a one man project, Mayer is helped out by a band of musical guests who flesh many of the acoustic based songs to give them a Sufyan Stevens style baroque feel - No Easy Way Out being a notable example.
The melodies are strong, the arrangements are lush but the songs are so full of rehashed romanticism that by the end you long for reference points that take us beyond empty fields and heavy hearts into the mess of the real world.
The Late Call's website
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