Not Everything Beautiful Is Good is English singer/songwriter
Findlay Brown's second album for the Nettwerk label and fourth overall. A follow-up musically and tonally to his reflective third album, 2015's Slow Light, they both follow a move from Brooklyn to a rural part of his wife's home country of Denmark. They also both embrace a quiet, contemplative folk-pop, though
Brown has described this album as having "more optimism." Even without knowing his surroundings, it evokes long walks along sylvan paths on a dewy morning, as it contemplates love, his place in the world, and the search for contentedness. While there certainly are graceful acoustic guitar tunes to be found on the album ("Call It What You Want" and the title track, for starters), more lively entries include "Sound in the Distance" and "Feet to the Flame," which offers brisk drums and light strings as the songwriter arrives at a personal life philosophy. Other songs reinforce
Brown's delicate guitar picking with strings, or strings, horns, and timpani in the case of "Feathers from the Fray." Less psychedelic than 2008's
Love Will Find You and less melancholic than Slow Light, Not Everything Beautiful Is Good is considerate and self-assured, with a state of mind and arrangements that leave room to breathe. ~ Marcy Donelson