Sam Roberts - We Were Born in a Flame

Genre pop Publisher Lost Highway External Links Sam Roberts Lost Highway

We Were Born in a Flame presents Sam Roberts as hapless and nostalgic everydude. In "Taj Mahal" (not the Jorge Ben song) he's "stealing a kiss on the streets of Bombay." The opener, "Hard Road," finds him complaining about a girl who "always arrives when I'm leaving." He's too young to be older, "time is a slippery fish," and in "Dead End" his brother has to lend him bus fare. He reminisces about chasing his old dog around the yard, he worries about the modern world being too cold.

This is post-post power-pop, derived from the Beatles and Badfinger through Oasis. It's not quite intricate enough for prime power-pop, far more straightforward than Big Star or the dB's. But he has a way with a riff and at times the music has an agreeable sort of complexity; he breaks up the structures, he layers acoustic guitars and throws in interesting keyboard sounds. The casual cool and sublimated angst of the gentle 6/8 ballad "This Wreck of a Life" recalls the Zombies, for example, and in general the virtue of We Were Born in a Flame lies in the way Roberts and his band keep things moving, fresh. There isn't quite the attention to verbal and musical detail that would elevate this to classic status, but Roberts does try hard.

The voice isn't terribly distinctive--it's the forward motion of the tunes themselves, the anonymity of the not-quite-glossy sound itself, that's the selling point here. The Beatle-esque riff used in "Rarefied" seems to signify Roberts's intentions more than anything in the lyrics themselves. It's funny to think about how formal this music is while Roberts sings lines like "Baby baby you're so cruel/You got me breaking all the rules." He's not breaking any rules here--he believes in rock and roll without really doing anything overly creative with the form itself. But I never knock formalist pop when it's as well-made as this.

There are four or five pretty good songs here--"Taj Mahal," "Where Have All the Good People Gone?," "Higher Learning" and "This Wreck of a Life" would fit comfortably on a mix CD along with Jellyfish, the Posies, Blur, the Pooh Sticks. Lauded in his native Canada, Roberts demonstrates an affable cool here that isn't overly compelling, at least to this Tennessean, but which has its attractions. This one mines his childhood; I fully expect the next album to record some tour experiences in the belly of the great beast to the south.