Artist:Newton Faulkner
Release:Studio Zoo
Released: 2013
Label: RCA
Catalog#: 88883758222
Format: FLAC / Lossless / Log (100%) / Cue
Country: UK
Style:Folk rock


01 Where to Start
02 Treading Water
03 Plastic Hearts
04 Indecisive
05 Just Outside
06 Losing Ground
07 At the Seams
08 In My Head
09 Don't Make Me Go There
10 Lay Down
11 Waiting on You
12 Innocent
13 Orange Skies

Deluxe Edition:
01 Possessed
02 Keep Trying
03 Can't Give It Away
04 Plastic Hearts (Instrumental)

Like Jason Mraz and Jack Johnson, this Surrey singer/guitarist makes laidback amiability his calling card, and has thereby reaped two of the most ignorable No 1 albums of recent years. Studio Zoo is a lesson in why Faulkner needs to start playing against type; rather than swaddling every song in layers of delicately picked guitar, he should have found his inner wildebeest and let it roar. There's plenty of disquiet in the lyrics – Faulkner is forever fretting and apologising for his very existence, to the point of telling his girlfriend, on At the Seams: "As if your life wasn't hard enough, you chose me." Had he stopped burying the emotions under passive-aggressive sweetness and let his voice ratchet up a few notches, this could have been an interesting album. The place to start would have been the aptly titled opener, Where to Start, in which José Gonzálezish dream-pop strumming damps down the frustration of romantic disappointment. "I'm tired of love, don't need nobody," he murmurs. Fine, now say it like you mean it.