After his first album Musicforthemorningafter, Pete Yorn could easily have been considered an underappreciated musician. But with the release of his third album Nightcrawler, Pete Yorn has once again failed to live up to the expectations of that album and is fast on his way to becoming an underperforming musician.
To its credit, the album itself has few missteps—only the mildly annoying ""Splendid Isolation"" is particularly notable for its mediocrity. Yorn tries to be clever with the lyrics, but his attempts at pop culture references fall flat. Georgia O'Keeffe and Michael Jackson are mainstream, if dated, characters, but the references themselves are meaningless and trite, offering no additional depth or humor to the song.
""Georgie Boy"" is another inferior track for Yorn, with a mishmash of '80s electronica and bizarre lyrics. The repeated call ""Georgie Boy,"" sometimes electronified and followed by a creepy laugh, makes little sense. Yorn has never been known for being easy to understand, but this song is just plain weird, even for him.
The rest of the album, however, is worse than these songs because very few songs are remarkable at all. Yorn at his worst is entirely forgettable—even a couple songs from his first album had a bland, lackluster quality that made them easy to skip over. With this album, however, skipping over the boring songs would leave you with approximately three or four tracks.
These three of four tracks are the bright spots in a rather gray album. ""The Man,"" a pretty duet with Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks, is one standout. Martie Maguire, also of the Dixie Chicks, lends her fiddle-playing to the song, which blends well with Yorn's often-folksy style of guitar and makes it more distinguishable from the less successful tracks.
The quirky ""Broken Bottle"" is also a quality song, with a pared-down guitar and piano melody keeping the track blissfully simple. ""Ice Age,"" on the other hand, is complex and variant, showing off Yorn's entire range of sound in a lengthy, five-minute song that goes from quiet and pretty to energetic and back again.
While the album itself lacks energy, Yorn's rerecording of ""Undercover,"" first heard on the soundtrack to ""Spider-man 2,"" provides the most power of any song on the album, with driving, not whimpering, guitar music that proves Yorn does have some rock in him after all.
Unfortunately, a few good songs do not make an album. For a musician with so much potential, both for sensitive folk rock and powerful alt-rock, this album is a disappointment. Nightcrawler is, to quote a somewhat famous movie character, music you put on when you ""want something [you] can ignore.""
