(indie, psy-art-pop) Joe McKee - Burning Boy - 2012, MP3, 320 kbps

Locating himself at some triangulated point between Nick Drake, Scott Walker's first four solo albums and Tim Buckley, the Australian singer-songwriter Joe McKee has made an album as smooth and shiny as mother of pearl. Like Drake, he sings softly over fingerpicked acoustic guitar; like Walker, he employs lush bursts of MOR strings for emphasis; like Buckley, he sounds as if he's striving for musical transcendence, though unlike Buckley he never quite achieves it. Part of the problem is that very shininess: there's no musical grit to produce the pearl. So constant is the wearied, somnabulant mood, so unvarying is McKee's soft, unassertive baritone, that most of the 10 songs drift by without leaving footprints in the mind: the nearest he gets to drama is the occasional introduction of percussion. There's no doubting McKee's talent, and on A Double Life, a half-reverie, half-nightmare of childhood, he swings into focus in a way that suggests the next album might be the one to watch.