Fact: Michelle Branch was the first celebrity musician I remember having a crush on. (I was the weird 13 year old who didn’t think Britney Spears was all that great)
Look, I’ve never been a big fan of the whole pop singer-songwriter thing. Folks like John Mayer, Jack Johnson, and even to some degree Michelle Branch have always seemed like a dime-a-dozen act to me. In large part they’re all interchangeable (it’s why I’ve never bothered to cover the folks that come to Arcadia, since it’s stuff I’ve already seen a thousand times). But Michelle Branch’s debut album came out before the bland chillness of Mayer and Johnson got big, so I hold The Spirit Room up a bit higher. Both musically and emotionally this album spans a fairly wide range, and doesn’t sound like the same song about the same person over and over again. The singles “Everywhere” and “All You Wanted” are clearly the superior pop songs in the set, but that doesn’t mean that Branch can’t show off an impressive set of pipes on album closer “Drop in the Ocean”, or prove that she can in fact play the guitar on “Sweet Misery”. The biggest disappointment about The Spirit Room is that it was a one-time thing for Branch, since she recorded a more pop-rock oriented album in Hotel Paper and then went on to form the underwhelming country band The Wreckers. This album might get lumped in with a lot of the garbage that came out in the early 00s, but at least it was semi-unique garbage.
Michelle Branch – All You Wanted (YSI)
==TJ==
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Album A Day, Michelle Branch
