Peer Review: David Pollack, Under The Covers

If songwriting can be an experience for the author to cultivate self reflection, to make positive insights and articulate complicated feelings about love, relationships, society, the environment, cats and dogs...you name it; it can also be a vehicle for admitting one's lesser qualities. Usually this falls under the more noble topics of longing, jealousy, or anger, and less often delves into the uglier "I'm sometimes a shitty person and I'm really not proud of these things I'm about to tell you" territory.

In "Under the Covers" David Pollack eats the ice cream and sleeps in too late, things we all harmlessly do, but he also mentions fear, detachment, and more troubling faults that he isn't willing to divulge. The phrase "Under the Covers" is repeated at every turn of the song; yet it doesn't twist or turn Pollack's insights rather than obscure them. The best songs that use metaphors craft their own, and "Under the Covers" isn't necessarily the most inventive.

Pollack's warm laid-back voice, solid melodies, and streaming chord sequences are mirrored by the cozy production and flowing instrumentation that is reminiscent of Sea Change era Beck or Tom Wait's Closing Time ballads (both had a knack for balancing the strange and the pedestrian). Pollack's next tune could potentially drift into the odder spaces that "Under the Covers" hints at (either through lyrics or instrumentation or both) while simultaneously existing in the pleasant folk-country.

by Dead Painters
(read their review)