Album review: Lee DeWyze, 'Live it Up'
Rating: 2 stars (out of 4)
As Lee DeWyze discovers on his first album after winning “American Idol,” his career is no longer entirely his own. That’s the case with every would-be artist who survives the annual popularity contest. They are inevitably squeezed through a music-industry processor that weeds out all the quirks and eccentricities that once might’ve made a singer compelling. So even a potential radical such as 2009 runner-up Adam Lambert ended up sounding more like Taylor Hicks than Freddie Mercury on his “Idol”-curated major-label debut.
DeWyze, 24, grew up in a blue-collar family in Mt. Prospect, Ill., and worked as a paint salesman. Though not nearly as flamboyant as Lambert, he demonstrated on “Idol” that he has a knack for earnest folk-soul, credibly covering Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine” and the Cornelius Brothers’ “Treat Her Like a Lady.” Windowdressing’s not his thing. He’s best in coffeehouse mode, simple and direct.
Two locally released DeWyze albums, “So I’m Told” (2007) and “Slumberland” (2010), were nothing special. But the better tracks had a brooding, introspective quality that demonstrated a willingness to push beyond pat, pop formula. What he needed is someone to coax that out even more, to further develop the relationship between his acoustic guitar and the hint of sandpaper grit in his everyman voice.
But “Live it Up” (RCA) sounds like it was created in a laboratory; it’s designed to be inoffensive, clinically precise, airless, as if those were virtues that would entice radio programmers to buy in, and fans to prolong the “Idol” lovefest. “Live it Up” is less the national debut of an emerging artist than a cautionary tale about how an industry takes over a career and makes it conform to successful formulas.
There’s a slice of Jack Johnson’s just-ambling-barefoot-in-the-sand mellowness, a splash of Jason Mraz’s pleading sensitivity. DeWyze’s breathy accents could’ve been lifted from the latest John Mayer ballad. The production gives the music a compressed, unnatural brightness. Though DeWyze is listed as a songwriter on most of the tracks, they’re committee efforts with lyrics that evoke Facebook-page poetry. Consider the chorus to the album’s first single, “Sweet Serendipity”: “I’m always landing on my feet/In the nick of time/By the skin of my teeth”
“Dear Isabelle” moves closer to finger-picked intimacy, but in general DeWyze never moves beyond journeyman competence. With the relentlessly bland “Live It Up,” he becomes the latest in a long line of folk-pop singers air-brushed to melt into the pack, not rise above it.
greg@gregkot.com