The difficulty in combining folk with pop is that while the sound can be more accessible, the songwriting tends to simplify itself, taking away from the natural storytelling style of folk music.An Easy Escape, the third studio album from Shelley Segal, tries to find the perfect balance between the two with mixed results.
Album opener ‘What I Want’ does well at both storytelling and maintaining a pop sound, but it’s too much for a first song, feeling like it’s in a rush to set things up. ‘Morocco’, while based on Segal’s own experience in the country, seems to focus more on the pop sounds rather than the story, which is a shame as it could easily be expanded upon.
An Easy Escape tends to feel like a folk artist’s attempt at injecting some alternative into the mainstream; like a tourism video that ends up making a destination look somewhat cheesy.
It’s clear Segal is a natural storyteller; it’s just a shame that instead of focusing on that, she seems more concerned with attaining a commercial sound. And that doesn’t make it a bad album, but when you hear songs like ‘Big Fish’ and ‘Answering Machine’, you can’t help but feel it could have been more.
3/5.
An Easy Escape will be released on Friday May 30 through True Music.
