Tom Ovans - Get On Board
Sometimes the automatic respect that a legendary artists new recording gets can be quite amazing. Its like the biased feeling you have towards a new album that has been released by a singer or band who’s last effort made a lifelong imprint on your heart. The trouble is, and anybody coming from a more objective view point can see, that the new album probably isn’t actually up to much.
This is a problem that happens all of the time to Bob Dylan, but as it is BOB DYLAN the scale of over-hyping can be extraordinary. His last five albums have reaped rewards far greater than they have deserved, solely on the back of the fact that the man has produced a mammoth 10 or so albums that many would rate as the best ever written. But with more and more of the inevitable ‘Best Albums of the Noughties’ lists popping up everywhere, what is most startling is that Dylan’s latest albums are dominating the higher reaches of these lists. A damning indictment of modern music to say the least, the fact that a mans startlingly average work, compared to the dizzying heights that he has reached before, is still better than most artists finest moments.
This irrational Dylan-love is the only reason I can think of for anyone finding much to like in Tom Ovans new record, ‘Get On Board’. Ovans is a poor man’s ‘modern day Dylan‘. His music is based around a country rock formula, which basically translates as 4/4 rhythms over monotonously strummed acoustic guitars for 3 verses 4 choruses and a bridge, with Ovans voice leading the pack along.
Ovans voice is SO Dylan that its hard to believe that he isn’t putting it on, and the trouble with sounding like Dylan is that you will inevitably get compared to him. This may seem unfair but its hard to avoid, and if Ovans music is close to any particular era then it is the old man in the nineties and noughties. Ovans lyrics just don’t compare though, and as such its really hard to find anything that people couldn’t get to a better standard on say ‘Love and Theft’. The fact that Amazon mistakenly listed this album as ‘Get On Bored’ for a while probably says it all and although Ovans has a rather big following having released 13 albums before this one, I can only hope that this album has been a big change in direction that he can quickly come back from.