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Charley Lawrence
(
seacoastonline.com
)
April 2006 A great way to tell if you like a new album is if you start trying to sing along the first time you hear it and have no idea what the lyrics are. You sound like an idiot with a mouthful of marbles but at least you are entertained. With a post office box in Seattle and passport stamps from all over the world, Hans York has collected enough influences to mash into his new release, "Inside Out," to turn me into exactly that idiot. With the first few bars of the first track, I was hooked. The words that I didn’t know to sing were these: "I can breathe against your noise, I can feel it in my skin, There’s a pulse that warms me over as another breath begins from the inside out." Brilliant and hooky as heck. The turkey wasn’t done yet. The second song is as strong as the first and for that matter, so are the third, the fourth and the fifth … and the sixth and the seventh … I imagine that you get my point but in case you have the attention span of a gnat, let me put it plainly. All of the songs are good and none of them sounds the same. To give you a loose idea of what Hans York sounds like, imagine if Andy Partridge of XTC and Joe Jackson could be distilled through a filter of Jonathan Brooke with just a pinch of Joao Gilberto and the clean guitar of Bruce Cockburn. Shake and serve cool.
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