Neil Halstead – Oh! Mighty Engine
Matthew Ralph
On the eve of the release of Neil Halstead’s latest solo offering, I had a dream I was in a college cafeteria watching Halstead perform. It was awful. He played one Mojave 3 song and then kept playing what sounded like the same holdover from the mid-‘90s grunge song over and over. In the dream, my wife was visibly annoyed because, well, she doesn’t have much of a tolerance for ear-grating noise posing as music. She walked out of the college cafeteria and I was starting to follow her when I woke up.
Whether it was caused by some irrational fear held over from my punk rock days of calling sell-out to any band or artist that, say, toured with someone of the likes of Jack Johnson, I’m not sure. But a few days later, my wife and I were in our kitchen listening to Oh! Mighty Engine and it didn’t sound anything like it did in the dream. Even better still, my wife – who is skeptical of any of my purchases because it means one more CD to add to the stack – liked it.
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