2 out of 5

Label: self-released

Producer: Dan Potthast (recording), Lance Reynolds (mastering)

Yeesh.  Painted portraits.  This is the local indie artist album you pick up at Borders after hearing them pluck their guitar while you sip coffee and browse medical journals to confirm your suspicions about whatever illness you don’t have. (Three points for dated Border reference.)  I dig Dan Potthast; I dig his throaty yowl and his sweet, poppy composition skills, both of which feature on this album.  But I also like the Dan whose oddball, slightly macabre observations have provided for some truly awesome rock songs via mu330, and some surprisingly rich songs with his various pop outfits (the Stitch-Ups, the Bricks).  Dan solo has been uneven, though albums like ‘Eyeballs’ show that both of these styles can translate well to reflective acoustic stuff.  ‘Around the World,’ though, is fairly empty in comparison, borne as it was from a theme of – I guess – writing a track from and about various cities while on tour.  You can hear the seeds of how the idea may have started, with the autobiographical ‘Melbourne’ kicking things off, but the majority of the disc is just an exercise in staying active in writing music – I’m here, let me write a song for the ‘Around the World’ disc.  These are tracks that will get the crowd to clap for you but otherwise have no meaning.  Most of the songs that fit this bill will start out with a line like ‘Hey (city name), you’re so (something that rhymes with city name),’ and then repeat.  Harmless… and also not very memorable.  Admittedly, some songs break through this to fit the more expected Potthast mold of contemplative stories – ‘London,’ ‘Detroit,’ – and then there’s ‘Southampton,’ which seems to just relate a story that happened in the titular town but nothing to do with the the place itself – but these still feel like they’re songs that wouldn’t naturally exist if the album theme hadn’t motivated them.

Dan’s pop skills and smarts with simple composition keep ‘Around the World’ from being a bad disc, but it definitely ranks as B-sides to an otherwise impressive career.