Donavon Frankenreiter - Glow (Album)

Pro surfer turned musician Donovan Frankenreiter makes the kind of chilled out, surfy soft rock perfect to fuel a study session, ease a hangover or just generally make a bad day better. Make your way through a pleasant enough intro track which regrettably fizzles out to nothing, and when things get started properly you’ll see what I mean. The album’s title track kicks things off here, and from then on it’s nothing but sunny. ‘Glow’ is a perfect lead-in, with upbeat lyrics crooned atop a haze of Hawaiian favoured guitar and washed out reverb. It’s probably the strongest track on this release, and from its prime position on the track listing it sets up the upbeat, beachy, laid-back-to-near-vertical feel of the record as a whole. Honestly, I can’t get over how positive this feeling of this album is. Even when Frankenreiter delivers lines like, “Tonight could be the night to break us”, somehow cooing them in that breathy half whisper of his makes it seem less of a worry, and more of a gentle encouragement to make sure it isn’t.

I guess it’s unsurprising that Frankenreiter has stuck to the formula that made his previous releases such successes. There’s plenty of cruisy, acoustic surf rock out there – but Frankenreiter seems to have nailed the formula. I’d say a large part of his strength comes from his voice, which is perfectly suited to the pretty acoustic fingerpicking which crops up frequently across this batch of songs. Even when he does choose to rise above a breathy murmur, he maintains a subtle rasp which works fantastically. The instrumentation is never overdone – which is great because the aforementioned acoustic guitar/voice pairing definitely warrants undivided attention – but there’s enough going on to keep the songs from coming off as too simplistic or repetitive. There’s plenty of catchy and memorable choruses here – particularly on ‘Push’ and ‘Shadows’ – which help to distinguish these songs from one another, but all in all there’s a fair amount of similarity amongst these songs. If you were to listen to the record through intently I suppose this could become a bit grating or boring, but given the music lends itself to the role of background soundtrack and occasional singalong inspirer, this really shouldn’t be a problem.

Frankenreiter isn’t breaking any new ground with this release, but that really doesn’t seem to be the point here. He’s crafted a bunch of really nice songs, and they sit together perfectly – even enduring bookending with awkward intro/outro tracks.

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