C.R. Avery - Magic Hour Sailor Songs

If the concept of an 'enigma' was originally conceived in 2008, it might very well have been born to describe the strange wares of C.R. Avery. On Magic Hour Sailor Songs his work once more ranges from breathtakingly brilliant to tediously mundane. For evidence of the former see opener The Boxer Who Just Returned From London: in a four minute spoken word track Avery manages to squeeze in the plot for an entire underdog movie. The rather contrived New Stanzas For Amazing Grace, a Dylan-esque country ballad that exposes Avery's less than remarkable singing voice, is the flip side. The album is punctuated by moments of greatness, like the harmonica driven Hell Of A Hotel Of Harm which has Avery at his beat-boxing best. This momentum is briefly maintained with Down At The Café, seemingly one of Tom Waits' orphans that got away. As yet, however, Avery hasn't quite found the balance between rambling genius and self-indulgent mediocrity. [Neal Parsons]