Album: Jeb Loy Nichols

For his third album, American expat songwriter Jeb Loy Nichols wanted to make "a very immediate, emotional record, the kind of record that's very rarely made these days, non-cynical, no irony, nothing clever". He may have fulfilled his intentions with the aptly titled Easy Now, an album whose limited animation makes the average JJ Cale record seem like the babblings of a hyperactive child, but the soft-centred ingenuousness of his smooth, laid-back country-soul numbers leaves much to be desired, approaching as it does the blandness of Seventies MOR outfit Bread. Songs like "Letter to an Angel" and "Better than Beautiful" are mild, affectionate love notes with arrangements that take pains not to step too heavily on Nichols's voice, a baritone croon whose gently pleading tones recall country legends like Charlie Rich, John Anderson and particularly George Jones, but without their gnarled patina of experience. Sentiment and repetition induce torpor in song after song, with the wilting attitude of "A Little Love" ("I don't want to set the world on fire... I just wanna be who I am") all too accurately signalling the project's meagre ambitions. Even when he adds a slightly tougher funk edge to proceedings, as in "Sure Felt Good To Me", the song's saccharine portrait of a romantic idyll quickly deflates its momentum. I'm delighted that he's so blissfully married and all, but there's a limit to the number of times I want to be told about it. There's something intensely irritating about such effusive happiness – a sort of diffident, folksy smugness that's the diametric opposite of rap-metal, but none the better for it.