A former keyboard player in the vaguely Catherine Wheel-ish contemporary Christian group Starflyer 59, Richard Swift struck out on his own at the turn of the decade. His first two records, Walking Without Effort and The Novelist, came out on as a double album in 2005 on Secretly Canadian, and he's been putting out music in dribs and drabs ever since then. All of it has been perfectly competent but a little dull, suggesting an MOR-indie mind-meld of Ron Sexsmith, Michael Penn, and Andrew Bird. On last year's head-turning Ground Trouble Jaw EP, however, Swift switched things up, ditching the midtempo piano ballads for strutting, ersatz blue-eyed soul and warbling in a killer, outrageously goofy Frank Zappa-meets-Bobby Darrin falsetto over loving recreations of Spencer Davis Group oldies. The EP was slight but unexpectedly winning, and it signaled a shift in direction that sets the stage nicely for the grander affair that is The Atlantic Ocean, his first proper full-length since 2007's Dressed Up For the Letdown. Wisely keeping the looseness he found on Ground Trouble Jaw, Swift spruces everything else up with the sort of painstaking classicist touches that overly ambitious singer/songwriters have spent hours in the studio refining since at least Todd Rundgren's Something/Anything?.
Rundgren's soft-rock opus actually makes for a decent entry point into The Atlantic Ocean. Like Rundgren, Swift slips a surprising amount of bitterness and acrid observation into his smooth AM-radio soul songs, which are built on the laid-back earthiness and jazzy chord voicings of 1970s Carole King. "Spend your prayers, I'm an unbeliever and I don't feel right/ I can barely sleep at night/ Got no one to make me cry/ And everyone knows when they're gonna die," he croons beautifully on "R.I.P." (Man, that Starflyer 59 breakup must have been brutal.) Both have a fondness for injecting blurts of "wacky" studio noise into their compositions; see the quivering jello mold of keyboards perched atop "The Original Thought". Also like Rundgren, Swift spends a lot of time honing the most devastating takedown of his exes he can manage while finding the prettiest way to couch it. "It's already gone, hang your head, hold your tongue/ Because it's nobody's fault but our own," he sings sweetly over the lilting waltz rhythms of "Already Gone".
Rundgren isn't the only obsessive studio rat Swift will remind you of, though. "Ballad of Old What's His Name" is a nice compendium of all of Swift's touchpoints: slide guitar lines that ape George Harrison's tone and cadence so closely that you almost check to make sure you didn't accidentally put on "Savoy Truffle"; barrelhouse piano and an airy vocal melody that evokes Harry Nilsson; a harmonizing backup choir of sweetly sighing Swifts; and an outbreak of horn charts at the bridge. "The First Time", on the other hand, opens with a chugging little drum machine and a single plunking banjo, sounding before the verse begins for all the world like the work of the blonder, prettier Swift. "The End of an Age", meanwhile, has a sweetly autumnal horn coda that could have been ported in from a Burt Bacharach song.
All of this namechecking, by the way, tends to pop up in reviews when the album in question isn't quite vivid enough to stand on its own terms, and, well, check: Swift is hugely talented musician and a meticulous craftsman, but his voice isn't terribly distinct, and as a result his albums usually end up being a bundle of good ideas lacking an animating force. Swift has figured out how to make pretty music, but he hasn't found anything compelling to say through it. "I got the right LPs, I got the Lou Reed and all the Blondie you'll never need," he sings on the title track, and it illustrates, once again, the wide gulf separating an immaculate record collection from the ability to do anything interesting with it.
