(Heartpunch Records)
Reviewed by Barry Lyons

Virtually any songwriter or group with allegiances firmly rooted in '60s Brit pop is going to put up stakes in particular camps. If it's a garage sound you're after, you can't avoid the influence of the early Rolling Stones. If you've got a slightly poppier sound but with slashing guitars as your ideal, you turn to the mid-period albums by the Who (and, perhaps, to the first major band in their debt, the Jam). And if you're an exponent of the intimately carved tale, you might turn to the "Penny Lane"/"Lovely Rita" side of Paul McCartney's work with the Beatles, but you'll probably own an even greater debt to the Kinks. This is where New York-based singer-songwriter John Dunbar comes in.

Dunbar has been kicking around in various guises since the 1990s. He headed up a band called A Confederacy of Dunces, which released two albums. Since that band's break-up, he has released two solo discs, one album by a short-lived band called IFFY, as well as one CD he called the Konks, his Kinks-inspired response to the Rutles. Dunbar now returns with his third solo recording, The Moment You've Not Been Waiting For, a not-quite-successful collection of songs that primarily calls to mind his songwriting hero, Ray Davies, that are delivered in a voice that sounds like a cross between Chris Difford and Michael Penn.

Dunbar has a great knack for employing irony and setting downcast lyrics of woe and regret against a jaunty, buoyant sound. For example, the opening song, the infectious, acoustic-driven "An Afterthought," has "She learned a lesson you'd rather not be taught/How to become an afterthought" that is at odds with the music's upbeat sensibility. "The Arms of a Woman," with its "Sunny Afternoon"-like rhythm, also shows off Dunbar's penchant for crafting witty Ray Davies-ish lyrics ("Nobody knows he's a filled with keen bon mots/Because he's a built much like a young Don Knots") set to a scampering music-hall beat.

Although Dunbar has great instincts as a producer and arranger, he would be better served if he had someone else at the helm. Part of the problem here is that Dunbar plays all the instruments, and while he's certainly proficient as a multi-instrumentalist, his performances don't quite have that requisite snap and crackle that only a seasoned band can bring. A greater problem, though, is the rather congested sound of the production, with some of the instruments sounding buried in the mix. For example, the aforementioned "The Arms of a Woman" has an old-time piano sound that, if it had a brighter, "up front" sound to it, would have made the song even jauntier than it is. Dunbar also likes to employ occasional quasi-psychedelic textures to the background of some of his songs, but if he were to double-check "Tomorrow Never Knows" by the Beatles, he would discover that it is possible to employ such a sound without losing any focus or clarity.

All told, The Moment You've Not Been Waiting For suffers a bit from a vague sense that many of these songs didn't quite get past the demo stage, problems that would have been rectified by a full band and a producer other than himself. In "These Days Have Been Going on For Years," the narrator (Dunbar?) muses that "these days I'm feeling I should change careers." No, he should keep to the one he has. Dunbar is a gifted lyricist and he has a quirky way with melodies, but to these ears - and it is the arrangements and production that I have in mind here -this CD comes off as a decent collection of songs that, if Mitchell Froom had shepherded into fruition, would have resulted in a solid and very fine pop album.