Carey Ott - Lucid Dream (2007)

As a melodicist, Chicago singer/songwriter Carey Ott is in the Neil Finn school of low-key classicism; the songs on his debut album are resolutely tuneful but never blatantly hook-filled. Strong echoes of Paul McCartney regularly appear as well, most blatantly in "Mother Madam," and at his best, Ott is a worthy heir to both. First single "Am I Just One" (featured on a key episode of the medical drama Grey's Anatomy long before the album even came out) starts Lucid Dream off most encouragingly. Immediately, however, "Daylight" and "Hard to Change" sound unnervingly like carbon copies of each other. Throughout the rest of Lucid Dream, it becomes clear that Ott is working from a fairly limited set of songwriting and arrangement tricks: the upward modulation on the chorus, the shift into a slightly cracked falsetto at key points, the perfectly deployed handclaps. As a result, Lucid Dream has a somewhat workmanlike quality to it, one that rarely slips into the sense of effortlessness that a truly great melodic pop album has. It's a somewhat flawed, but nonetheless promising, debut.