Album Review: Burning Boy by Joe McKee

Locating himself at some triangulated point between Nick Drake, Scott Walker's first four solo albums and Tim Buckley, the Australian singer-songwriter Joe McKee has made an album as smooth and shiny as mother of pearl. Like Drake, he sings softly over fingerpicked acoustic guitar; like Walker, he employs lush bursts of MOR strings for emphasis; like Buckley, he sounds as if he's striving for musical transcendence, though unlike Buckley he never quite achieves it. Part of the problem is that very shininess: there's no musical grit to produce the pearl.

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