Music must be good for you or it there wouldn’t be so much of it about. Then again, you could say the same thing about radiation. Or Macdonalds for that matter. Anyway, what has all that that got to do with Sounding Rick’s album “Dinosaur Bones”? Well, this is actually the seventh album from Sounding Rick so their music must be good for you.
The funny thing though is that this album sounds more like a seventeenth than a seventh album. For a start, it has that dated retro feel to it – you even get a bit of white boy proto rap in the title track – that seems so popular these days outside of Europe though, admittedly, it is a very convincing bit of remanufacturing that has been done here. The songs have been injected with singalong hooks and melodies that would surely attract the ears of radio programmers (if such people actually did more than recycle old hits these days) and some, such as “Politician”, manage to evoke comparisons with the likes of Squeeze or Jonathan Richman. Yes, underneath that layer of low fat cheese there might well be a bit of the old subversion adding some spice to the melting pot of eighties’ influences.
It would have been easy to dismiss this album as like many albums of its sort – written, produced and engineered by Rick (Reynolds) himself – it does suffer from indiscipline thus weakening a good few of the songs by allowing them to drag on way too long. Well, it would have been easy if the album hadn’t turned out to be so likeable. So, trust your own ears and give this one a listen. It might well be good for you too.
Available from Bandcamp.