In Stores Now: Accept the Mystery by Graham Smith

Photo titled "Convair XFY-1" from the San Diego Aero Space Museum Archive, August 1954

Graham Smith released his tenth album recently, not under the Kleenex Girl Wonder moniker this time - I recently heard that he has limited his use of that name because of legal threats from a certain tissue company. For Smith, it's just been another setback in a songwriting career that has had plenty of ups and downs - through it all, though, he has continued to deliver first-rate pop music with a lyrical bent. I've belabored the similarities between Smith's music and hip-hop in previous write-ups on this site, but Accept the Mystery continues this trend with some new twists.

This time around, nine existentialistic tales are set to rhythm-based backing tracks to create a feel kind of like a rapper's mix tape. Where Smith's last two albums, Yes Boss and Mrs. Equitone, were filled with anxious rhythm guitar and long verses sung at a mile-a-minute pace, these songs stretch out and breathe by comparison. They are till far more verbose than the average song, though, and Smith seems to have continued his practice of using Wikipedia's Random Entry function to bring interesting people and places into his songs. As a result, you get a song like the invective-filled "Jeff", in which Smith addresses a person who is either Catholic folk figure Prester John or Toto drummer Jeff Porcaro about the difference between the way things seem and the way things are.

"The Will of John Roach" is the rapped recitation of a dead man's will that will catch the ear of anyone with an interest in estate planning, and "High Touch Consumer Wizard" goes back to the "relationship song" material of Yes Boss in a digression from the album's theme. Shout-outs to locales like Ctesiphon, Thessaloniki, Paramaribo, and the Orinoco are matched by beats and sounds that give some of the songs an exotic feel, while references to Papa Roach, Hudson Hawk, and About Last Night... keep the songwriting connected to pop culture.

I have two gripes with Accept the Mystery: 1) it could use a tenth song - even with the songs having a fleshed-out and relaxed feel to them, the album almost feels incomplete, although this may be attributable to my phobia of nine-song albums; and 2) Smith is only making this album available as a digital release through kgw.me, which is why it took me a couple months to getting around to reviewing it. My favorite track on the album is probably "These Things Are Nice...", a song that marries the album's mystery-oriented theme to a perfect pop structure. "Life’s a bit like a burn victim: we see its
Harsh reality, and yet we prefer fiction." Check it out.

"These Things Are Nice..." by Graham Smith