KEN STRINGFELLOW
Soft Commands
Yep Rock
· Remember all those early '90s "grunge" movies that weren't really like grunge at all? Remember Singles? Reality Bites? Was your life in the early ’90s anything like that? Didn't think so. Mine either. Man, those movies sucked.
Ken Stringfellow used to be in the Posies, with whom he made a string of great records and crap movie-soundtrack contributions that no one really listens to. Now he stares out from his solo album covers looking his age and aiming at that classic singer-songwriter mantle that his best work's always hinted at.
Written and recorded all over the place (at home in Seattle, on the road in Stockholm, Hollywood, Paris, New York, and, erm, Senegal), Soft Commands is the type of grown-up record that your parents would love to have subjected you to on family holiday trips between their tapes of James Taylor and Carole King's godforsaken Tapestry.
Still, when he's good, Stringfellow is very good – the Beach Boys homage "When U Find Someone" more than makes up for the limp ballads on either end of it, and "Je Vous En Prie" even pulls off French café with an echo of Leonard Cohen.
But man, once Stringfellow works his way towards the (extremely) white-man dub of "You Become the Dawn," it's obvious that something is seriously wrong. That he follows it with "Dawn of the Dub of the Dawn (feat. Gaffa Man)" hints he may have lost it entirely. Worst of all, once Soft Commands is finally done, it's hard to even remember a thing.
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