Here's My Song...

The rest of the title is "You Can Have It...I Don't Want It Anymore/Yours 4-Ever," which sounds considerably more somber than the songs themselves feel. Far from being a farewell, Nicolai Dunger's seventh album is something of a consolidation of ideas explored separately on its two immediate predecessors, the jazzy Soul Rush and the folk-centered, largely acoustic Tranquil Isolation. The album's cover has the carefully posed, studied look of a late-'60s middle-of-the-road pop singer's "relevant" album (complete with pensive profile shot and artful cigarette smoke swirls), and there's a little bit of that peculiar collision of easy listening and light psychedelia in these songs as well. So listeners get songs like "Hunger," which sounds shockingly like Moondance-era Van Morrison (even more than Soul Rush sounded like Astral Weeks), "Slaves (We're Together Like)," which sounds like Gasoline Alley-era Rod Stewart hijacking the sessions for Nick Drake's Bryter Layter, the acoustic chamber folk of "White Wild Horses," and the rich orchestrations and twangy pedal steel of the lush opener, "My Time Is Now." So, unlike Dunger's previous albums, which tended to have a specific musical theme, there's a kind of scattered, everywhere at once quality to Here's My Song. In a peculiar way, however, it works, showing the full range of Dunger's abilities and influences. An album that synthesizes all of these disparate strands into a whole would be nice, however.