Dan Croll – Emerging Adulthood

Dan Croll could probably fill a small swimming pool with all the bells and whistles on Emerging Adulthood. His sophomore record is sticky with ear candy, every track jam-packed with diverting little nuggets of production wizardry and imaginative embellishment that grab your attention in an instant. The music he makes could broadly be called pop-rock, but such pigeonholing doesn’t do justice to the variety of styles he gleefully appends to familiar verse-chorus templates.

Away From Today has the flavour of a spaghetti western showdown, all blistering trumpets and dusty acoustic strumming, while the chorus on Tokyo sounds like Van Halen’s Jump given an EDM update. The riff on One of Us has a distinct whiff of Sum 41, whereas whoever’s playing piano on Do You Have To clearly digs Grizzly Bear’s Two Weeks.

Indeed, Croll is as much a curator of nifty sounds and gimmicks as he is a songwriter (perhaps even more so), and you often get the impression his words and melodies are merely an excuse to upend the musical toybox and have a good rummage around. Occasionally he lands on a flourish that expresses something specific, like the jarring MIDI-ish guitar tone on 24 which, in its anxious jaggedness, is an apt counterpart to the lyrics 'Please don’t let it be a heart attack'.

More often though, he’s happy to settle for novelty alone. And while that’s no crime, it’s unlikely to set your world on fire either.

Listen to: Away From Today, Sometimes When I’m Lonely