James Ingram shows a lot of prom­ise. He has a good voice. But, as a record­ing artist, he has a long way to go. The music that he plays is very much “pub rock”. It’s unpol­ished, and in places it feels unfin­ished. The lyr­ics are not well suited to the music, and there are a few points where the clashes between what he wants to say and what he wants to play are quite appar­ent. His writ­ing is also pretty cliché in places: I think every teen­ager in the Eng­lish speak­ing world has writ­ten a poem, or a song that rhymes the words “phone” and “home”, but Ingram was a couple of syl­lables short of even this, and rhym­ing “tele­phone” and “home” just grates on the ear. Non­ethe­less, towards the back end of the album there are some inter­est­ing bits, flir­ta­tions with a Neil Young style sound, it was just too little too late to my ear. And I know that this is per­haps being picky, but an Eng­lish voice singing about Grey­hound buses sounds too much like you’re try­ing to be Amer­ican. It’s not a bad album, don’t get me wrong, but it’s likely to gather dust on my shelf for quite some time.