The All Music Guide says, cheerily, that Rosie Thomas "wouldn't sound out of place spilling from the ceiling of an extremely popular coffee house chain." Indeed, her fourth album, co-produced and with vocal and instrumental assistance from Sufjan Stevens, is full of the kind of basic strum-alongs and diaristic musings that yield showers of Starbucks praise. Such sleepy, easy folk albums as These Friends of Mine seem to be the incantation of some big retirement: from a job, from zest for life, from love, from creativity and insight, from nesting in any neighborhood coffee shop other than the obvious.
A song like "Paper Doll", a lazy, plucky, empty-room duet with the dull title metaphor at its center is not just background music, it's background thought, a self-indulgent bit of fluff. "Kite Song", similarly, is like a foolish, breezy blog entry. Instead of showcasing or exaggerating Thomas' vocal talent with heavy reverbing, the production only exposes the intentional cracks, assumedly meant to represent an emotion we should sympathize with or truly feel.
Thomas is a zealous close-talker who ironically discusses the private contents of her romantic life with utmost simplicity and either storybook metaphors or candid platitudes. Take the ridiculous cliché that somehow rises to the heights of emotional climax in "Much Farther to Go": "I have much farther to go/ Everything is so predictable/ I should just click my heels together/ And go home/ But I'm not sure where that is anymore." The setting of this song is a subway train to Brooklyn Heights, and the subject family, crying, Jesus, "something about paper dolls," and "something about the cross."
Playing fan's advocate, one could say we are supposed to relate to this song's stream-of-consciousness tale of displacement and Oz, when really there could be nothing more dissatisfying than predictable, entry-level chord progressions following around shallow, first-draft thoughts. For such an experienced singer-songwriter to record and release such simplistic melodies, needless and jarring vocal effects, and déja-vu insights is surprising and negligible.
"Songbird" is a perfect example of Thomas' ability to straddle two pop-folk musical philosophies and probably gain some sort of following for it: she wavers between the atmospheric swirls and croons of a singer like Sarah McLachlan and the utterly traditional, unfussy, but refreshingly virtuosic work of Lavender Diamond's Becky Stark. Thomas makes a case for both DIY acoustic work and odd vocal add-ons; the difference is that the two elements remain starkly at odds and that the material she writes recalls the above contemporaries only in style, not level of originality. The title track, a fun, lo-fi chorus round at the end of the album, is the only moment of enjoyment here: it's a quiet, sunny blues artifact that, while still superficial, still retains an element of novelty.
