3 out of 5

Label: Flight, or digital bandcamp download

Producer: John Congleton / Rodney Parker

Not for me, but I get it, and it works.

Joey Kendall is your Ben Folds singer/songwriter type, with clever lyrics, good pop riffs, some ballads, some cheesy stuff.  He sticks primarily to a guitar / drums pop mix, but then you have an opener like “Game On Video Edit (instrumental)” that’s a great little glitchy pseudo electro thing.  It’s tough because about half of these songs really appeal to me – Kendall cuts his vocals at just the right pitch to stop from becoming whiny, and the lyrics hover at about the same level – but the bandcamp page does state that Joey has “been writing songs, composing, releasing CD/CDR/MP3’s allover the USA since i was small souled juvenile” and the whole of this album does speak to that – toward the latter half it becomes a very live sound and the cleverness seeps out, becoming more cloying.

At it’s best moments, “Was Here” sounds like Jump, Little Children without the poster boy dreams – it rocks, it shuffles, it croons and it sings in proper quantities.  It’s never ‘at it’s worst,’ really, it just becomes really average singer/songwriter stuff, and the album being back-loaded with this type of material wipes away a lot of the joy found in the opening tracks.