Newcastle singer-songwriter Michael Chaney is the latest artist to come before our New Bands Panel, who took a listen to his first handful of songs on his myspace page.
Louis Gilbert: Singer-songwriter blues afflict this young man from Newcastle. Yearning and self-cathartic lyrics like Damien Rice (‘I’ll be writing songs about you but you won’t ever know it is about you’) work their way around. There are breezy major chords on ‘Brainy girl’ that are pleasing to the ear. There are easy rhymes and easy times from this troubadour and an acoustic cover of ‘Bullets’ by The Editors also.
Jono Ganz: Michael Chaney lists Damien Rice and David Gray as influences on his myspace page, and this influence shows in his music, a tried-and-tested breed of acoustic folk pop. It’s perfectly listenable and one or two tracks are actually quite catchy, but I can’t help but despair at the lack of originality in his music. He describes his music as sounding like “whatever you want it to sound like”, and this is exactly the problem: it seems as if he’s writing songs that he’s certain will be liked by everyone. However, in doing so he loses all originality and is lost amidst the multitude of similarly bland musicians around today.
Ian Parker: There’s nothing fancy about Michael Chaney’s music – no tricks or gimmicks. Just one man and his guitar. And while he can certainly sing, he’s not blessed with some angelic voice either. So for this to work, he’s relying on his songwriting alone. Listening to what he’s done so far, there’s potential in the standout myspace opener Blood and War, or the way Let Me Do This Alone skips along, but the full collection doesn’t sound strong enough yet.
You can check out Michael Chaney’s myspace page here.