Released April 13  

Acoustic troubadour Kris is here with a special message for his lady. Unfortunately, he’s intent on broadcasting it to the world in general as well. “You are my life support/ I pray you never pull out the cord” he yelps in AOR’s standard sincere manly balladeer voice – sort of gravelly but also whiny. It’s the voice most of us use when trying to emotionally blackmail loved ones into making us toast when we’re a bit hung-over, but here Kris puts it to torturous and merciless use in the service of a plethora of sickly, cringe worthy and utterly interchangeable odes to his love.


In a way, it’s laudable that Kris is a man unafraid of singing about his emotions. Less laudable are the relentlessly hackneyed sentiments he dredges up to help him get said emotions across.  On ‘Old Shirt’ - a song which, staggeringly, favourably compares his relationship to a tatty old shirt – Kris warbles ‘Years go by/ It fits me better/ The threads/ They somehow stay together/ Just like you and I’. One finds it hard to picture the recipient of this song smiling sweetly and knowingly at its sentiments. More likely, she’d be seriously considering booting her raggedy-arsed busker of a boyfriend out on his, well, raggedy arse.


I Think We Both Know is aptly named, since this is an album which deals exclusively in crushing clichés of mind-numbing inevitability – it’s ok to pray, sunshine as release, darkness as absence of love, seas of doubt. Song by song, the clichés pile up until you cease to count them, surrendering finally to Kris’s vision of life where soft/bright/sun/home equals good, and hard/dark/rain/strange equals bad and the slow trickle of safe, unambitious, smothering chocolate box nothingness kills any genuine emotions you may have had, leaving in their place only the echoing drone of a man’s voice, wittering endlessly about his shirt.


This voice is the absence of passion.



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Posted In Album Reviews, Mar 29 2009. Words - Richard