Album Reviews

This is a weird, squooshy, watery record. The music is soft and squooshy, the lyrics are soft and squooshy. Songwriter Art Halperin’s voice is particularly squooshy, the background musicians play softly and squooshily, and even the veteran recording and mastering engineer Barry Diament has captured it squooshily in real stereo in a pleasingly reverberant church using a pair of carefully placed microphones.

Halperin’s straight from the 1960s/1970s lyrical vibe combines the earnestness of The Youngbloods's “Get Together” with the middle-America melodrama of Kansas’s “Dust In the Wind.” His music is a squooshy (that word again) blend of 50’s folk trio, 60’s singer/songwriter and Bluegrass with a sprinkling of Seals and Croft thrown in for good measure.

The melodies, anchored in familiar folk chords, subliminally express common ’60s musical sentiments that today can sound quaint and hopelessly dated. Lift sounds like it was retrieved from a musical time capsule in part because it is so innocent-sounding and free of irony.

Unfortunately, that quality also makes some of it unintentionally humorous. Take the “save the earth” plea “Rescue the Future.” The lyrics include the “blackened skies” and treeless forests left for the “children of tomorrow” you might expect, and the chorus admonishes “Oh, you better hear what I say, we’ve got to rescue the future for the future is here today,” but Mr. Halperin’s delivery of the “Oh, you better hear what I say” part is so wimpy and squooshily melodramatic and so at odds with his actual intentions, you just have to laugh.

Which gets to the record’s biggest problem: Mr. Halperin’s odd, limp singing style, which reminds me of a headphone-wearing teenager singing along to himself and occasionally accidentally vocalizing out loud and then embarrassingly pulling it back in. Mr. Halperin sings in a thin, soft voice that never goes south of the very top of his throat. In fact, he likes to end phrases by launching them from the space between in front of his teeth and his lips. There’s no chest or body involved and when he should be projecting at the end of a word or phrase with greater volume and emotional commitment, he retreats, swallows it and disappears, making it sound even more squooshy and unresolved.

Mr. Halperin writes catchy though familiar and shop-worn melodies attached to equally familiar constructs and lyrics. That said, he is a talented melodist and his lyrics are serviceable.



Sometimes the musical and lyrical sentiments are at odds with each other as on the musically joyful “Outrun This Pain” and “Tomorrow’s Another Day,” both of which express anything but joy lyrically. Halperin goes to the Bluegrass “ditty” well a few times too often.

The backing musicians are all skilled string instrumentalists and they play with great sympathy, making everything sound equally soft, limp, muted and unresolved, helped of course by a recording that presents everything softly and in the distance, though incredibly natural-sounding and real. And of course, when the background singers add their nuanced harmonies, they too are whispering.

The ballad “No One Knows the Weight,” stands out above the rest thanks to an introspective, jazz-tinged melody and lonely, smoky lyrics.

In the end though Lift, performed with great skill by the backing band and attractively engineered, is a trite exercise. That said, I kept listening for months to this fascinating, though ultimately flawed project, mainly because it is "cut from whole cloth," musically and sonically.

I just think Mr. Halperin should get some vocal lessons so that he can learn to project more forcefully from within his musical soul and more importantly lose some of the distracting vocal affectations.