PYGMY

Keith Christmas was a strange British folk-rock singer/songwriter to evaluate -- one who by this third album was quite good at developing interesting, pretty-yet-downbeat musical backgrounds for his songs, but not particularly good at other parts of his craft. On the more baroque arrangements here, he sounds rather like a British folk-rock variation on the sad orchestrated pop of the early Bee Gees. That might sound weird, but he pulls it off fairly well on "Traveling Down," "Timeless and Strange," "Evensong," "Poem," and "Forest and the Shore," the last of which is decorated by some particularly creepy pseudo-Gregorian operatic backup vocals. Yet his voice remained a thin, rather unconfident-sounding instrument. His songs were often too vague and meandering, usually in a quite melancholy and self-absorbed-seeming path, failing to invite as much engagement as their musical settings did. The relatively happy-go-lucky acoustic guitar busk of "Spanky" and funky rock of "The Waiting Grounds" and "Song for a Survivor" sounded a little out of place in this company, though they weren't bad tracks on their own terms. For all its faults and inconsistencies, however, Pigmy's certainly the best of his first three albums. ~ Richie Unterberger|