Kitchen Table
2007
Seeds
About This Album
You never know just which Martin Sexton you're going to get from one track to the next on Seeds, his first studio album of new material since 2000s Wonder Bar. In a sense that's always been true of this chameleo-like singer/songwriter, but this time around the patchwork quilt of styles and sounds is even more deliberately premeditated. Citing the Beatles' interlocking song suites of Abbey Road and the impressive array of cartoon voices masterfully invented by the late Mel Blanc as his dual, if disparate, inspirations, Sexton worked hard to lay out a landscape of surprising shifts in temperament and environment for these songs. And then he worked doubly hard on the fine-tuned, last-minute touches, tossing in found sounds and a bit of this and a lot of that to dust each track with a signature. But none of that in-studio fancifulness would be worth much of anything if the songs were no good and, for the most part, they are fairly fetching. That's not immediately apparent, however: "Happy," which opens the album with tossed-off lines like "the first day of summer vacation/apple pie and relaxation," is a bit more simplistic and obvious than one has come to expect from Sexton (although the "choir," all of whose voices belong to Sexton, is pretty cool).
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 and 10)

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