Richard Swift The Atlantic Ocean

I suppose I can see what Jeff Tweedy saw in Richard Swift when he invited Swift to tour with Wilco in support of their 2007 album, Sky Blue Sky. There’s potential here and catchy hooks abound. But Swift’s latest album, The Atlantic Ocean, sounds tirelessly like someone who can see the light but can’t reach it, dancing around it fervently but never getting any closer to the finish line.

It should be said that Swift’s hoppity piano-led pop tunes lasso together the quirkiness of post-Beatles Paul McCartney and the, well, the quirkiness of Spoon. That’s a lot of quirk, and it’s fun but never really fulfilling, like a sweet snack that makes you hyper for a bit before it leaves you like a thud. This is how the first half of the album progresses, which may as well be one epic piano dance instead of five little pop songs due to their interchangeability. That’s when the oddness of The Atlantic Ocean sets in – it’s quite significantly backloaded with some real standout pop songs – some that don’t even rely on piano!

The first sliver of hope arrives with Hallelujah, Goodnight!, which is still a piano-heavy dance song but with a notably thoughtful hook and some decidedly en vogue synths. It gets better from there with the folksy The First Time, which has some real, driving momentum behind its road trip riff. The End of an Age regresses back to the same old Spoonisms, but it sounds just a bit more refreshing in its new surroundings.

And, just like that, there is another fantastic explosion with A Song For Milton Feher, a damn fun, olde-tyme tune that in a parallel dimension could have definitely been an alternate theme song to the show Cheers. The closer, Lady Luck, is even better – opening with a simple two-note bassline, it sounds like Swift’s album was hijacked by Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, although I’m pretty sure that’s Swift singing in perfect Motown falsetto. It’s a throwback song that doesn’t sound like a throwback song – it’s legitimate R&B gold.

The Atlantic Ocean is essentially a great EP with a load of gunk jammed in its grill. It’s unclear what exactly Swift was trying to do arranging the album this way; perhaps he had an old-school perception of the record that literally had a side A and a side B, or maybe he wanted to tie musical themes together in neat bundles. Either way, it may have helped to simply rearrange the track listings so that the piano trots don’t simply fade into each other. It’s a really crippling quality, because if I wasn’t obligated to listen to this album to review it, I may have been lost as a listener before the real highlights started kicking in. If you’re reading this, stick with it. It has some real rewards in the back end – my only hope is that the songs were recorded in chronological order, to suggest that this is the direction Swift will take future albums.