reviews / 2012

BEN SOLLEE - Half-Made Man

Name: BEN SOLLEE – Half-Made Man
Item: Half-Made Man
Rating: 6
Author: Lorenzo Righetto

2012 (Self-released via pledge music)

alt-country, soul

by Lorenzo Righetto

Not bad for a "half-made" man: having just wrapped up a 2,000-mile bike tour to fight coal mining in the Appalachians (which often results in mountaintop removal; the project also included a collaboration with Daniel Martin Moore), Ben Sollee launched a crowdfunding campaign for his first self-produced record.

Though extremely personal (if "The Healer" and "The Maestro" deal with his relationship to life and art, "Unfinished" again refers to his existential state as a person in fieri, and so on), "Half-Made Man" is, first and foremost, a record made out of a great love for music.

Caught between intellectual lyricism ("Unfinished") and lighter instrumental flourishes (the opening "Whole Lot To Give"), Ben Sollee seems here to lend soul shadings to a kind of Bird-esque expressiveness (an impression reinforced by the fact that he's a cellist as well as a songwriter).

Refined, sparkling arrangements for strings and guitar thus frame compositions in which Ben's maturity and experience decisively outweigh their inspiration, which is often all too conventional, despite his ability to range from country ballads ("Roam In The Dark") to world-tinged indie-pop ("The Healer").

A record bound to hit hard live, and one that gives something of that away given its live-in-the-room recording, "Half-Made Man" has too much craft to truly impress, even as it stands as another commendable chapter in a fine artistic journey.

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14/11/2012

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Lorenzo Righetto, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition