by Oliver on March 6, 2024 in Album
William Elliott Whitmore is also a weak record Silently, the Mind Breaks failed. However, the American’s ninth studio album is not essential to his discography.
The fact that the best albums by the man from Montrose are now far in the rearview mirror is, of course, fundamentally quite relative, given how much Whitmore’s music has always been out of time. But come Silently, the Mind Breaks Despite all the basic love for the archaic singer-songwriter art with a dusty western ambience, it doesn’t go beyond the status of a slightly above-average standard that at least does its job in a pleasantly entertaining way with 10 songs in 32 minutes.
In Be Still A still and always great voice, a banjo and a subtle thumping of the bass drum are enough to create a solemn, morbid mood, whatever I Can Relate applies, only with caution. Has To Be That Way The direction varies a little with lively folk-rock guitar, is pleasing but not compelling, ripples along in a symptomatically atmospheric but compositionally irrelevant way: you’ve simply heard all of this from Whitmore before. But he now sounds almost effortlessly unpretentious.
In the unspectacular highlight Darkness Comes the flatbed truck rumbles gently and contemplatively over the prairie, its endurance quite captivating and imaginative, while the lively bluegrass reduction Break Even takes longer than is necessarily amusing. The snappy, but also quickly forgotten Adaptation And Survival thumps nonchalantly by the soft campfire and brings to mind Jack Black vocally. Bunker Built For Two Meanwhile, in a duet with Nicole Upchurch, she waits for the apocalypse in casual survival mode Dance With Me as economical acoustic rock is designed to be a bit harsher and through the minimalist guitar banter What for gets some air before the conciliatory one A Golden Door To An Empty Place leisurely and comfortable in harmony remains simply too non-committal: the songwriting is solid, the performance is good, but the bottom line is that the result is quite underwhelming.
So Whitmore isn’t really doing anything wrong, but this time he simply (again) fails to complete an essential piece of the puzzle of his career (anymore): where the 45-year-old’s best pieces were once able to eat with skin and hair and sounded so experienced in life that you were afraid , it’s all on the mild, decidedly unspectacular side Silently, the Mind Breaks never an option (although there is always the lingering suspicion that more friction could have been used to get more out of the material).
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