The cheeky, borrowed falsetto has been cracking up the U.S. pop charts this summer, giving proud citizens all across America a perfectly valid excuse to indulge their normally repressed, squeaky and lustful whines: somehow, howling along with the cab radio has never sounded as sexy as it does right now.
Appropriately, singer/songwriter Chris Lee's third record, Cool Rock, sees Lee maintaining the same high, heady croon that instantly earmarked his work back in 2000. But Lee's meandering easy-listening vocals don't come with the same kind of lemme-borrow-this-for-a-sec homage that Pharrell's or Justin's have so neatly built inside. Mostly, his warbling coos just feel disembodied and awkwardly appropriated, like a trucker hat that hasn't been properly tweaked; whereas Lee's pop contemporaries openly own and toy with the results of their stealthy pilfering, it's like Lee just pretends that Stevie never even happened! The result is karaoke-Buckley, a record full of vaguely self-indulgent vocal noodling without the grinning nuance required to make anybody want to roll down the windows, crinkle their nose, and yowl along.
Clocking in at a little over thirty minutes, Cool Rock plays like a smoothed-out, perpetually swooning exercise in pseudo-soulfulness. It's not so much that Lee himself seems especially disingenuous or affected (although he occasionally does), it's that his songwriting has somehow disintegrated into shapelessness-- which, in turn, exponentially amps up the inherent sappiness of gooey soul-singing.
Lee's self-titled debut was comparably sharp and capable, with a sort of quasi-Southern, bashful charm; Cool Rock is mushy and benign, with most of the record's eight tracks lost in a haze of overwrought vocal cartwheeling, vague backbeats, and garrulous guitars. Lee has gone elevator-polite, laying down the smarmy sentiments and boring instrumentation without the slightest bit of self-awareness.
Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley mans the drumkit for Lee (Shelley released Lee's second record, Plays and Sings Torch'd Songs, Charivari Rhythms, and Oriki Blue-Marches on his own label, Smells Like Records, back when Lee was still earning a shitload of half-hearted Buckley comparisons), but his musical influence seems pretty negligible, as Lee lumbers from adult contemporary ballads to poppy swan songs.
There are a handful of redeeming moments: the overdubbed horns on "(I Was a Teenage) Symphony to God" are so unselfconsciously predictable and retro-lounge that they're almost charming. Perhaps more notably, the somewhat ironically titled and buried-at-the-back "Say It Ain't Soul" is an unquestionably solid, standout track-- thankfully spare instrumentation (on Cool Rock, less is almost always more) showcases Lee's undeniable vocal prowess and range, and his wails are finally pretty convincing. Then, a few minutes later, the record ends.
