Across four solo albums (and turns in bands like Woods and the Babies), Kevin Morby has always worn his influences on his sleeve. Or record sleeves if you will: Depending on your Ikea shelf space or online playlists, one might hear throughlines to Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and Leonard Cohen’s New Skin for the Old Ceremony, the rock-as-savior gestures of Spiritualized and Springsteen. Or maybe you hear Lou Reed, Nick Cave, Randy Newman, and the War on Drugs instead. Depending on the line and moment, Morby can deftly emulate all of the above. The more you appreciate this rock canon, the more likely that Morby hit some of your sweet spots. Even when it came to covering the feral punk of the Germs, Morby found a way to make “Caught in my Eye” sound like a lost Dylan cut.
On Oh My God, Morby’s fifth solo album, he continues to speak in rock’s vernacular, right down to crafting the kind of spare, remorseful album that sounds like the aforementioned artists’ attempts at gospel. Even on his 2013 debut, he gave a nod to Dylan’s then-maligned gospel phase, so it’s always been latent in Morby’s music, but the world and life events that have transpired since then have brought them to the surface. Oh My God makes these strains overt and heavy-handed.
Right from the start, Morby and band are in solemn states of mind. “Oh My God” features little more than piano, organ, and Morby’s unanswered prayers to “come carry me home.” Celestial hums swoop down to accompany him and a filigree of saxophone takes over. It’s tasteful if toothless, imparting not so much a sense of salvation as a smooth jazz interlude.
Meticulous as the sound palette is throughout, favoring sustained organ chords, close-mic’d guitar strums, and the patter of hand drums, the effect starts to smudge everything together. Repetitions of phrases like, “Sing a glad song,” and, “Carry me home,” and, “Oh my God,” creep across a number of songs, each time delivered with such weariness that you wonder whether you’re listening to the same songs on repeat. The exclamation of the title soon feels as rote as a text message acronym sent out ad nauseam.
There are grim themes to grapple with in our modern world, and a recent profile on Morby suggests he too was dealing with the same awful aftermath of 2016 as the rest of us, unable to get a handle on answers. Yet rather than scrabble for hard-fought insight, Morby time and again veers off into cliché, giving us insipid lines like, “Everything we do is a mess/But oh, honey, may this mess be blessed,” and, “Fe-fi-fo.” Elsewhere you can find rhyme schemes for “pray/say/okay” and “fly/sky/cry.” Halos and horns and wings abound, but there are no stakes to be found. You start to pray that Morby sees his way to stop looking to the gods of rock’s past and just speak his own language.
