Release Date: Sep 23, 2016
Genre(s): Folk, Pop/Rock
Record label: Nettwerk
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Passenger's eighth studio album, 2016's Young as the Morning Old as the Sea, is a lushly produced album rife with subtle melodies and lyrics that reveal singer/songwriter Mike Rosenberg's soul-scratching itch to wander windswept rural landscapes. While Young as the Morning Old as the Sea follows on the heels of his stripped-down 2015 effort, Whispers II, given Rosenberg's use of orchestral arrangements and varied instrumentation from organ and trumpet to lap steel guitar, the album has more in common with 2014's Whispers. As on that album, Rosenberg here pairs with producer Chris Vallejo, a longtime collaborator.
It’s a struggle to believe, while wading through his seventh studio album, that Passenger was responsible for Let Her Go, the song most of Britain spent six months humming in 2012. There isn’t a single singalong number trying to set up camp in your temporal lobe on Young As the Morning, Old As the Sea – it seems that in his hurry to vacate the trodden ground of campfire pop, Michael Rosenberg hasn’t really planned where to go. Most of the songs here are almost identical, and the ones that manage to stand out are perfectly fine jaunts into well-cultivated sonic territories.
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