Broken Poets' lead singer/songwriter dynamo, Tim McDonald, is truly the voice of the average American male in that his songwriting, melodies, and vocal delivery are completely, uh, average. Just don't tell him that.
Nearly every part of this album feels equal parts contrived and self-important "" the album name (only two of the twelve songs are actually in E Minor), the guitar playing (a collection of sterile riffs that seem tailor-made for a VH1 Top 20 nod), and McDonald's painfully boring vocal delivery (think Counting Crows meets Xanax meets angsty-Myspace-teen-rocker). Worse than all that is the lyrics. The band's site boasts, "McDonald is not just writing from the heart but is consistently tapping into some mysterious source of inspiration." It continues, for nearly a page, about McDonald's "gift for poetically expressing an almost transcendent philosophical insight." Right. Insight like "everyone else has what I want, there's always something new, all I want is to be alone", from "The N and the R." Song of a world-weary broken bard, or whining of a thirteen-year-old girl whose mother just took away her cell-phone? Transcendent philosophical insight like this abounds throughout the album, most of it approaching gabba-gabba-hey levels of profundity.
Not to say the whole album is a loss. Quite the opposite, in fact, Russ Phaneuf's drumming is rich and explosive at just the right moments, and near-perfectly submissive at others. Classically trained Russian pianist Svetlana Antropova does what she can to add motion to the tracks, but with such an uninspired vocal/guitar combo drowning her out on most every song, it becomes nearly impossible to focus on her excellent fingerplay.
It's a shame that Phaneuf and Antropova, both seemingly excellent musicians, are stuck riding the coattails of a much less talented McDonald. This record, with the right frontman, could've been killer. As it is, the self-released copies of Optimism in E Minor are destined for a spot in McDonald's basement.
