Jon DeRosa's second full-length album, after 2012's splendidly titled A Wolf In Preacher's Clothes, is full of swooning crooning songs with a delivery that falls somewhere between Frank Sinatra and Scott Walker.
As exemplified in the Roy Orbison style opener, Fool's Razor, the bearded, tattooed New Yorker specialises in light orchestral 60s-era pop tinged with melancholy.
Sorrow stalks him to the point that the sun is variously personified as tearful (The Sun Is Crying), strangled (Coyotes) or threatening as in "here comes the sun to make a fool of me" on the Morrissey-esque You're Still Haunting Me.
Not only is the weather always crap but the ghosts of the past also weigh him down. Knock Once even finds him clutching at straws by actively trying to communicate with the dead.
"I want to feel as free as the sky" he declares on the title track but , as you'd expect from track titles like Lonely Sleep and High And Lonely, feelings of isolation prevail throughout.
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As with his debut album, DeRosa uses The Magnetic Fields' producer Charles Newman and one track When Daddy Took The Treehouse Down is a co-write with Stephen Merritt.
Like Merritt, DeRosa has a droll, baritone voice which means he cannot help but sound resigned and world weary. With such a downbeat tone, the relatively bright duet with British singer Carina Round on Dancing In A Dream makes for a welcome change of mood.
This is far from being a happy-go-lucky record, but it is an honest one and the quality of the song writing is uniformly high.
Paradoxically therefore, DeRosa sings the kind of blues that are more likely to put you a good mood.
Jon DeRosa's website
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