polaroids of androids

Chances are Josh Pyke has never slept with your girlfriend, beaten up your grandma or started nuclear war on a world scale - yet some people still seem to dislike him intensely. His music is unbelievably inoffensive, but on more than one occasion I have been accosted by someone telling me how much they not only dislike his music, but his whole persona as well.

I think my love of JP came about when I was fortunate enough to see him play a couple of times in smaller, more intimate venues (one of which was an abandoned church which may or may not have been owned by a retired hooker). This is where his music comes alive, the words start to jump out at you and the personal nature that is lost when transfered to recorded format really starts to make sense.

Much like his last album, Memories & Dust, this record won't completely blow you away on first listens. Even die hard fans will need a few repeats to get into it. But instant appeal has never been how The Pyke gets down. He is a slow burner. A candle, not a torch. He prefers to gently bring you over to his side and make you really feel his soul-emptied, metaphor-heavy lyrics and occasionally brilliant poetic lines. His work is fueled by it's familiarity just as much as it is by the pop-focused acoustic melodies, and I often think that a large percentage of 'da haters' would come around if they just gave him a chance.

But who has the time? We live in a world of iPhones, hi-res broadband pr0n and viagra-in-a-can. For this reason alone I feel that Pyke might lose me this time around. Besides the handful of up-tempo pop tracks (You Don't Scare Me and Make You Happy), which come too close to hitting his former storytelling high point (Middle Of The Hill), there isn't a lot here that would cause me to give it 'Cookie Mountain 2006' kind of heavy rotation.

If the music of 'Pyke dawg' doesn't already captivate you then this record probably won't change your mind. Great for wooing your lady into bed, perfect as background music for you 30-somethings who have 'dinner parties' and a fairly unobtrusive record to throw on while you recover from drinking 42 bourbon and cokes and/or winding down from work - but lacks anything special to make it a real winner.