Odludek.

Jimi Goodwin, lead singer and bassist for the popular British rock band Doves, recently released his first solo album, Odludek, while the group is on an indefinite hiatus. I was a longtime Doves fan for their eclectic approach to each album, use of heavily textured music that often recalled their brief time as an electronic act called Sub Sub, including the landmark The Last Broadcast, which hit #1 in the UK and produced a top ten hit in “There Goes the Fear.” Doves never found much traction in the U.S. – Broadcast peaked at #83 here and none of their singles charted – but that hasn’t deterred Goodwin from making a Doves-like album, even weirder on some songs than the most experimental Doves material, but far less even than his old band’s best releases.

Goodwin crosses many genres on Odludek, from ’70s funk-inflected tracks like the opener “Terracotta Warrior” to the electronic influences of “Live Like a River.” Oddly enough, however, the strongest moments on Odludek are when Goodwin goes acoustic, borrowing from the same source material that drives artists like Mumford and Sons and even underlies the sanitized Irish folk songs of Celtic Woman. “Hope,” “Oh Whiskey,” and the brilliant closer “Panic Tree” are all built on familiar acoustic guitar rhythms, each bringing a different twist to the format to avoid the “I’ve heard this before” feeling of the various knockoff acts sailing in the wake of Mumford’s first album (and I’d include their second album in that category). “Oh Whiskey” comes along like a drinking song, a plea to a different kind of spirit to bring him patience or empathy – but not the blues. “Hope” finds Goodwin singing beyond his range to begin the song, but gains intensity with the deep harmonies behind the chorus reminiscent of Negro spirituals. “Panic Tree” tells a family history of anxiety via the metaphor of, yes, a tree growing in the yard for generations, a serious subject treated with humor over music that sounds like it’s lifted from a nursery rhyme or a Raffi album.

The common thread tying the album together is a sense of musical exploration, grafting sounds on to each other even though the immediate connection isn’t apparent. That supports some of the weaker tracks where Goodwin cranks up the distortion and the tempo, as on “Terracotta Warrior,” which has horn-heavy breaks in between the heavily strummed guitar lines. Unfortunately Goodwin’s songwriting suffers as he tries to ramp up the complexity; “Lonely at the Drop,” an acoustic/electric track with lyrics that offer a bitter attack on Christianity, opens with a guitar riff we’ve heard a thousand times before and moves like a car that’s driving without a destination. “Man V Dingo,” the album’s most eccentric track, rides a dissonant riff too long – a tritone just begs for a resolution at some point – and comes across like an attempt to mimic freeform jazz in a rock format. The slowest tracks, “Keep My Soul in Song” and “Didsbury Girl,” pass by without making any impact, musical neutrinos that don’t showcase any melody or technical skill.

Doves may not return to the studio any time soon – the band hasn’t officially broken up, but it sounds like it’ll be a while before we get new material, if at all – and I was hoping a great Goodwin solo album would tide me over, but Odludek falls short of the mark. While the three strong acoustic tracks show off his sense of melody and make better use of his wry lyrical voice, the remainder of the album doesn’t have the hooks to justify the experimentation, and the lack of consistency across the ten tracks only seems to emphasize its lack of strong melodic elements.

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I won’t give Courtney Barnett’s The Double Ep: A Sea of Split Peas a full review, but there are two standout tracks on the album, which features brilliant (if weird) lyrics set to some pretty simple music. Most of the time Barnett seems to be sing-talking over her guitar, but “Avant Gardener” (available free on amazon right now) and “History Eraser” have actual melodies to go along with the insane stories she’s telling. “Avant Gardener” turns a routine afternoon going outside, picking weeds and preparing to plant a garden, into an asthma attack that sends her to the hospital; on the way she observes that the parademic “thinks I’m clever because I play guitar/I think she’s clever ’cause she stops people dying.” Meanwhile, “History Eraser” tells of a drunken evening in a style that mimics the meandering, stream-of-consciousness thinking of an inebriated person, but with tons of wordplay, assonance, and allusions that you’d have a hard time conceiving if you were sloshed. She’s one to watch if those two songs are any indicator of what she’s capable of writing.