plorentz's Full Review: Poison Kiss by The Last Goodnight
Don’t let Kurtis John’s big black mohawk fool or frighten you. And pay no attention to the theatrical emo locks of guitarists Anton Yurack and Michael Nadeau. And try to ignore the fact that these moderately pretty Connecticutian twenty-somethings were teetering on the verge of TRL fixture-dom, thanks to their singles “Pictures of You” and “Stay Beautiful”, just as TRL was slouching towards its whoooooooooh-punctuated denouement last year. On their fall 2007 debut CD called Poison Kiss, the six-man band called The Last Goodnight (formerly Renata) set themselves apart from the current pack of visually and nominally similar bands by playing music that willfully defies any kind of subgenre classification beyond the classic, record store standard catch-all “Pop/Rock”. Don’t be daunted by the copyright date either. Poison Kiss could just as easily have been recorded and released in 1974, or 1978, or 1982, and may very well have sold better if it had been.
The first time I put this CD on in my car, my 14-year-old son nearly jumped out of his seat: “A new Maroon 5 CD?”, he asked excitedly. Well, not quite. But the album’s opening title track (which might just as well be called “The Last Goodnight”), with its punched-up, jaunty angles, and Kurtis John’s heart-throbby falsetto vocals on the chorus really do make the song a dead ringer for Maroon 5. But where that band’s songs too often feel like little more than vehicles for Adam Levine’s rock star posturing, the songs of The Last Goodnight generally feel a little more sincere, more varied (though still probably not varied enough), and almost always, despite the band’s MTV-ready appearance, seem to pine for some pre-MTV top 40 radio Eden where pop songs were a more strictly aural experience. To that end, the boys of The Last Goodnight may certainly look like pop stars, but more importantly - not just for us, but (you get the feeling) for the band as well – their songs soundfantastic: three-minute AM radio masterpieces for a generation that has no idea what the hell “AM radio” means in this context.
There may be nothing spectacular or groundbreaking about songs like “Pictures of You” or “Stay Beautiful” – they’re merely better-than-average verse-chorus-verse radio singles – but each of them has a gem-like, self-contained sparkle to it that never fails to draw our attention, holding us blissfully rapt. These are not just songs. These are shiny objects! At times, as on the anthemic, nakedly emotional “If I Talk To God”, this music seems to cry out for the lush orchestrations of the late Gus Dudgeon as if they’d been carefully re-constructed from the fragments of ancient, discarded Elton John ballads, attic-bound Steely Dan demos, and other bits of classic pop/rock ephemera by musical archaeologists burdened with modern technology. You can almost hear Michael McDonald singing back-up on the bouncy toe-tapper “Good Love”, and its electric piano flourishes sound like they came straight out of a Supertramp session. The album-closing “Incomplete” has the kind of fierce urgency we might expect from a band like Panic at the Disco, only Kurtis sings it without the yelping affectations - he actually almost sounds like Rick Springfield!
Everything here is fairly brimming with mildly retro melodic deliciousness. Not a song goes by that doesn’t have you just dying to sing along with it by the time it gets to its second chorus, or wanting to skip back to it just as it starts to fade out. And that ends up being the album’s one major flaw: the songs of Poison Kiss simply work toowell as perfect, individual songs. By the time the album reaches the seventh or eighth track, a sort of charm fatigue sets in, and the formula starts to feel a little too plain, a little too obvious. On the other hand, this may be the perfect sort of album for a time when the idea of listening to albums straight through has been challenged, if not obviated, by the prevalence of mp3 players and their shuffle functions; and on a strictly bang-for-the-buck basis, there’s not a single song here that won’t reward a 99 cent download with virtually infinite replay value. These are songs that you’ll listen to compulsively – just not all in a row.
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
“Poison Kiss” by The Last Goodnight
Virgin Records
Released 8/28/2007
Produced by Jeff Blue
42 min.
SONGS: Poison Kiss – Back Where We Belong – Pictures of You – Stay Beautiful – This Is the Sound – One Trust – Return To Me – Good Love – If I Talk To God – Push Me Away – In Your Arms - Incomplete
Writing and recording Poison Kiss, their major-label debut, The Last Goodnight set the bar almost scarily high: We wanted to write great songs that no...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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