Perfect for a soundtrack

Reviewed September 2008

San Diego's Greg Laswell doesn't write soundtracks – and yet his moody and atmospheric folk-rock is regularly ending up on a lot of TV shows. "Smallville" and "One Tree Hill." "Numb3rs" and "Without a Trace." "Shark" and "The Hills." All of these shows have featured songs from previous Laswell albums, as did the film "Daniika."

Laswell's latest album, "Three Flights From Alto Nido," should continue that run of success. Immediately accessible melodies are presented in absolutely lush arrangements. Laswell has a warmly resonant singing voice, and his lyrics are intelligently intriguing.

And while that combination of smooth melodicism and smooth production do make for nice background music perfect for setting a scene on screens small and big, his better songs here – "Been a Year," "Days Go On" and "How the Day Sounds" (the latter two of which first appeared last year on a six-song EP) in particular – deserve to be heard on their own.

If there's a drawback here, it's that every track has the same downtempo vocal approach (even those songs with uptempo beats) – it's as if all the songs are meant for some teen-angst drama on the CW network. It would be nice to hear Laswell get out of his singing comfort zone and tackle an out-and-out rocker to shake things up.

Review by Jim Trageser. Jim is a writer and editor living in Escondido, Calif., and was a contributor to the "Grove Press Guide to Blues on CD" (1993) and "The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Blues" (2005).