The popular emergence of Bob Dylan in the 1960s considerably lowered the bar for what constitutes an acceptable singing voice, encouraging thousands of songwriters and instrumentalists who might never have considered performing their own vocals professionally to do so. It is one thing for the bar to be lowered, however, and another for the bar to be eliminated entirely. Dan Craig, an accomplished guitarist who probably shouldn't sing, turns in another album of original compositions with Wirebird, the tracks boasting confident, varied instrumental work marred by weak, irritating vocals. On his previous album, New Every Morning, Craig sometimes used Sarah St. Julien to sing with him, and that helped a little. Here, he occasionally double-tracks his thin, wheezy tenor, but that doesn't help at all. As ever, his lyrics are introspective, which offers some justification, at least thematically, to sing them so uncertainly, but that's not enough to sustain the album. On the discursive "Cherry Moon," he mentions "Blister in the Sun," which suggests that one of his models is the Violent Femmes, and maybe he thinks his voice isn't much worse than Gordon Gano's. "Would You Tell Me I'm Wrong" has a guitar part that keeps threatening to turn into Neil Young's "Down by the River," and Craig may have Young's tremulous tenor in mind, too. But those two, if not trained singers by any means, are far better than Craig, for whom mere competence is at issue on Wirebird.
© William Ruhlmann /TiVo