2 out of 5

Label: Battery Rocks

Produced by: Paul DeVincenzo and Søren Hansen; Dave Sardy (additional production)

While mainstream pop and its variants like pop-country generally aren’t my bag, upon hearing something in that vein I’ll try to take a step back and think through my listening history – so many things have grabbed me along the way that’ve been “mainstream,” whether or not I’ll try to retcon it with coolness – and then through my catalogue, which contains a sampling of J-Pop that I might not be so keen on if I understood the lyrics as the simple love and relationship pap they likely are. And as I’m going through these steps, whichever album or song will play on, and I’ll start to register: this isn’t all that bad. Mainstream is, after all, just another overall genre, and the type of songwriting and production that is successful within it (tweaks for its various subgenres) is a specialized skillset.

I don’t watch Nashville, the show which Sam Palladio’s debut album’s hype sticker tells me he’s a star of, but I’m distantly aware of its content, and figured that with a song named “Wake Me Up in Nashville” as his closer on ‘The Perfect Summer’s Day, Before We Lost The Light’ that the music would align with my vague concept of it – that being harmless pop country. This is essentially true, but I should perhaps consider more fully what modern musical TV shows tend to do: they do all the hits. So, yes, pop country may be your starting point, but let’s toss in touches of any given big hit song from the last decade or so, regardless of genre – you know, the radio hits familiar to our audience – and dust ’em with production glam.

On the very plus-y side of Sam’s album, this isn’t wholly the all-hands-on studio bakery of some mainstream productions, with the artist working with a fairly consistent crew of Paul DeVincenzo and Søren Hansen, assisted by superstar Dave Sardy, and co-writing shuffling between familiar, solid names like Ed Harcourt, and Sam’s fellow musician and wife, Cassadee Pope. This leads to pretty rootsy production that doesn’t over dress up Palladio’s warm vocals, and compositions that certainly find melodies but don’t push too hard for all-time singles, leaving room for some good solos and bridges.

However, what starts out as fairly harmless and pleasant pop on the album’s A-side loses that focus on the B-side, with cringey tracks like “SMF” – aka super mother fucker (siiiiigggh) – kicking off that TV impulse of bringing in different genres. This unfortunately underlines the rather empty-headed write-’em-in-your-sleep nature of most of the album’s lyrics, and then retroactively reminds that none of the song’s necessarily have much staying power; that is: the good impulse of going a bit more organic from the start prevents the stuff from sticking, and then allowing in nods to top of the pops hits on the B-side drives home an overall shallowness.

Surely if I was a fan of Sam’s from the show, or a watcher of the show, I’d likely have more appreciation for this material. I do dig Sam’s voice, which has a Phil Collins bit of rasp to it, lending at least superficial weight to his relationship odes, and Harcourt’s writing is apparent in some solid pop craft, enhanced by Dave Sardy’s tendency to dig out a grooving low end. Unfortunately, this sums up to something – to someone coming at this fresh – that’s inoffensively background music, until it becomes slightly offensive background music.