Singer/songwriter
Jeffrey Foucault likes to play in a familiar, slow-moving country-folk style; this is a guy who has been to the desert on "A Horse with No Name," searching for a "Heart of Gold." But he doesn't sing in the high-pitched tenor of
America or
Neil Young. Rather, he has a throaty baritone reminiscent of
Jackson Browne, if phrased with a Southern slur. He thus comes off like the
Nick Drake of the American Southwest on his sixth album, Horse Latitudes. The lyrical reflections he expresses so introspectively also tend to be spare and allusive, though he works up a head of steam musically (with the help of
Van Dyke Parks' keyboards) and gets a bit caustic on "Everybody's Famous." For the most part, however,
Foucault is a miniaturist as interested in evoking mood as meaning in his atmospheric music, expecting his listeners to fill in the blanks. ~ William Ruhlmann