Themes from The Magnificent Adventure

10/03/08 - With themes that encompass affection, lost love and flaunting, a title like The Magnificent Adventures of Heartache, Jason Reeves' latest release, sounds like it jumped out of your favorite teenage love-drama and into your unwilling lap.The album name implies that the collection of songs will take us on some sort of magical journey between love and unrequited love, but instead of a journey, we get a whiny routine commute through the everyday mundane. In other words, The Magnificent Adventures of Heartache sounds like a cliché attempt at recycling overused ideas while including very predictable musical arrangements.

The album opens up with the song "Someone Somewhere," inviting us upon a glass-half-full story of finding love through a glorious and fateful encounter. The optimism continues in the song "Happy Accident" where Reeves describes a situation in which love can be found in the most unusual of places, such as a busy train station. The two songs together present themselves as overenthusiastic camp counselors indulged in the making of macaroni art.

Reeves can also be described as a hopeless romantic singing one of his poems of flattery to his childhood sweetheart. In the song "Reaching," Reeves uses his best simile to project his love. He says, "Girl, you are like summer rain, soft and warm and delicate." Sounding more like something written by a freshman in high school and not by a major label musicia,n this lyric comes off like a satirical Hallmark card. Maybe Reeves' intentions were to intentionally sound juvenile in an attempt to sound romantic and cute, but ultimately he just sounds rudimentary and pretentious.

"The Fragrant Taste of Rain" continues the comparisons of a girl with rain. The song consists mostly of spoken-word, which should have no place on the album whatsoever. Reeves begins with, "she, like the fragrant taste of rain, rests in my senses, relentless, restless."

The utterance holds little comprehensive meaning and the over-emotional voice in which Reeves uses to recite the line is also regrettable. The track is a useless waste of space on an album that is already too long.

The Magnificent Adventures of Heartache seems to evolve as the songs progress. While the whole album is about love, the songs gradually move from a sense of happiness and euphoria to a darker side of love where it isn't always such a happy place.

Jason Reeves gives us the extremes of both sides of the love spectrum, and the sinister abyss of it is seen on the song "Gasoline." In it, Reeves sings, "she strikes the match as she is covering my heart with gasoline." Instead of sounding like those overenthusiastic camp counselors, Reeves now sounds like an enraged man leaving the realm of sweet and cuddly while beginning to descend into the depths of anger and hostility.

The Magnificent Adventure of Heartache is not a musical innovation by any means and in no way is it trying to be. The album clocks in at a highly unnecessary 66 minutes and every song emits a uniform sound of generic love-pop.

This definitely isn't some miraculous adventure to fight evil knights or fire-breathing dragons, but if you're into the whole macaroni art scene or if you're enthralled by the idea of 16 tracks about pretty much the same topic, then by all means, Reeves might be what you're looking for.