Blooming Roses

With a warm, inviting croon much like Lloyd Cole at his most reserved, and a small guitar band that suggest a modern day singer-songwriter in the parlor, Doug Hoekstra is easy to overlook. He doesn’t shout. Sometimes he barely sings. He nearly whispers. He doesn’t aim for the cheap thrill. He doesn’t cry for attention. His tunes are quiet majesty; they invigorate the everyday with a sense of purpose, but you have to listen close. “Gavin Geist” remembers an old mathwhiz classmate whose wife surprises Hokestra at their class reunion as she’s the perfect lid to Gavin’s pot. “Naper Vegas Scrabble Club” uses a jazzy groove as it recounts how people forget their cares with their hobbies. With a smooth, meditative melody “Subway Train” adds up the details of a woman on a Japanese subway down to her chipped nails whom Hoekstra declares “ain’t the kind to easily forget.” In “Disrepair,” Hokestra admits in his usual candor and honesty that some people only come to mind when he’s feeling down. It’s a world of average, everyday people shuffling past Hoekstra’s camera lens where’s he snapping away.