Dan Israel – Time I Get Home

Dan Israels sixth album reflects the plight of the lone ranger singer-songwriter these days. A homemade basement job cut with just a smidge of outside keyboard and percussion help, its insular, ardently wistful, and in its own way, bitterly uncompromising.

Flitting from downcast soul-searching balladry to mercurial folk-rock, its less a radical departure than a fitful melding of Israels power-pop tendencies (see 2003s Love Aint A Cliche) to the acidic, starkly personal material best represented by 2000s great (and largely unnoticed) Dan Who?

Israels best at the kind of internal conversations that torment every starving artist: Where you ever gonna go, when will you reach the bottom, ponders one song; I never meant to be a bully, still its pretty hard these days to stay alive, goes the title cut.

While the hangdog acoustic songs are affecting, they can start to blur; when Israel provides a bit more musical color, as on the withering All The Phonies and the barbed sentiments on loneliness and existentialism of the driving rocker Somebody Better, the record springs to life and escapes its monochromatic setting.

Time I Get Home is no stylistic or thematic groundbreaker, but Israel remains a true believer, a dedicated craftsman giving voice to the kind of universal sentiments most of us keep under our hats.