Jack Garratt - Phase

Jack Garratt
Phase
2016
Spotify

With the amount of media attention Jack Garratt has garnered in the past couple of years it is hard to believe that Phase is his debut album. Popping up all over the internet and British TV shows with covers and quite a bit of original material Phase is the culmination of all that PR work. The only problem is the product doesn't quite live up to spin. Jack Garratt is a decent songwriter and the there is nothing intrinsically wrong with what He does, it's just kind of boring. An R&B singer plying his trade over some electronic beats has just already been done. We don't really have a need for Jack Garratt when we already have Disclosure (whom he covered). If there was something transcendent or that one special thing that sets him apart this would be a different story, however that simply is not the case. The songs are often overly sappy, like "weathered", that they give off that air of inauthenticity. Does he really buy what He is saying or his He just saying it because He knows it is what the teens want to hear.

There are other issues with the record, first of all it is far to long clocking in with the Deluxe version at almost an hour and twenty minutes. If this was over an hour of solid tracks coming in at a nice pace this would totally be forgivable, but much of the time is spent with filler or building tracks that never really end up anywhere. The scope of his writing also seems to be big stadium filling tracks, but then the actual lyrics would do much better on a smaller scale. He doesn't seem to focus on the personal and the album suffers for it. You want to hear his thoughts not just the same societal tropes that get spun into yarns by every other artist out there. You'll find that this sappiness never seems to end, each track is another worn out combination of a weak story and grandiose ideas, not something that is overly exciting or catchy enough to become an earworm. The thing you really leave with after listening to Phase is that this record feels like it had to many hands in on it and that lead to something totally generic rather than someone's point of view. It is to bad because Jack clearly has talent, Phase was just not the right way to get it out there.

5 out of 10