About a third of the way through
Roy's second full-length album, the glorious lo-fi pop charmer "In My Defense" comes flying out like a lost
Guided by Voices nugget circa
Alien Lanes. With its urgent drumming and edge-of-yearning vocals, it's the first song on
Killed John Train to shake out of a midtempo Americana torpor that begins with the lengthy, forlorn harmonica solo at the front of the album-opening "Reno, I'm Coming Home." (The second track, the
Pavement-like "So Alive," is peppy enough, but disqualified on account of the just-way-too-lo-fi sound, which makes it sound like it's coming out of a transistor radio in the next room.) The hits continue with the early
Beck sound-alike "Jesus Drives a Trans Am," but following that double play, the album's batting average declines again with a long stretch of increasingly dull tunes featuring mournful
Mark Linkous-style vocal whines and colorless country-rock tunes occasionally tweaked with some
My Morning Jacket distortion.
Killed John Train seems more focused than
Roy's awkward, scattershot debut, but the band still has a way to go before it's thought of as more than the poor man's
Sparklehorse. ~ Stewart Mason