Simon Joyner
The Motorcycle Accident EP (Roomtone)
Nobody wants to be Bob Dylan any more. Finding a young man so obviously growing his hair in a Zimmerman cloud is only marginally less curious than finding an Al Jolson pretender, or a single with a heavy Mrs Mills influence. Yet Simon Joyner, a singer-songwriter from Omaha, very much wants to be Dylan, from his mangled drawl right down to his breathing patterns. For Bob's sake, he's even called this 'The Motorcycle Accident EP' - perhaps hinting, in a quaint way, that these are lost recordings from that mysterious post-crash era. They certainly sound like long-lost tapes, these fragments of spoken word, these lovely acoustic laments that appear to have been recorded among the traffic on the corner of Fourth Street with a drunken Will Oldham wandering in and out for local colour.
He even has a fine way with a lyric:"And if she loves you/You will know by the way she tells you to go to hell", he sings on 'Flowers On Her Birthday', while 'Sad Stories' rewards those maudlin winter cravings abundantly. "They bought a dog instead of having a child to see if they could love anything as much as each other", he intones bleakly. "But the dog returned to the wild...". Probably not a Hot Boy, all told - but certainly an endearing talent sighing through
the exhaust fumes.
If he calls the next release 'The Freewheelin' Simon Joyner EP', however, he will have to be killed with sticks.
Victoria Segal
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