Don't get me wrong Ezra has a very good voice, but there just aren't that many singers who can carry something with just their vocal performance. In my life when I think of such artists they are far and few between and doing it consistently across multiple albums is almost impossible.
Take for instance the first Lone Justice album. Marie McKee just kills it on that album. She takes a bunch of generic rock songs and delivers them with so much vocal skill you can't turn away from it. Lone Justice could never do that again.
In our lifetime who are the great vocalists? For some reason today I'm stuck in 1990 so I think of artists like Sinead O'Connor, Bjork, Tori Amos, George Michael, Mick Hucknall (Simply Red), Whitney Houston, Anita Baker, etc. I think about Anita Baker because she is magic on the album Rapture. A solid collection of eight songs that all fit perfectly together and she simply destroys every song. If the songs on Lone Justice were generic rock songs, then the songs on Rapture are generic R&B songs and Baker makes it a four star album easy.
This is the second album in a row I've reviewed where I felt the music and writing didn't live up to the vocal talent. I guess writing a solid album of songs is a pretty hard thing to do. Following the Rhapsody rating method I give it 2 out of 5 stars for Not Bad.
