Letters to the Future Album Review

Danny McCrum is an Auckland musician with a big reputation and a wide range of influences. He’s supported a lot of big names (Eric Clapton  and Jeff Beck to name just a couple), plays in the LA-based Magnolia Memoir, and has released 8 albums and EPs over the past decade.

The latest effort, Letters to the Future, takes those influences and experiences and wraps them up in 12 straight-to-the point tracks featuring a number of guest musicians, each of whom was left to play what they wanted on their own tracks. If you didn’t know that before listening to the album it can at times, on first listen, seem as though the band decided to play a group of unrelated songs in different styles and release them together.

The songs jump between alt-country, blues rock, pop, and even a little funk (on the second track, and the edgiest song on the album, Cool in Your Cardigan). But after a few listens you start to hear what the band is striving for, and it begins to make a whole lot more sense; more so once you realise the freedom the musicians had to put their own stamp on the tunes. It’s an experiment that could have gone quite wrong, but for the most part works well on Letters to the Future.

It would be easy, and a little lazy, to dismiss McCrum and his band as another middle-of-the-road adult pop group, but that would be to dismiss the strengths of the band, and the songwriting of McCrum in particular. These are well thought out songs, with strong hooks and fine musicianship from every player, proving that middle-of-the-road doesn’t have to mean boring.