Pitchfork

Some albums stride, some sulk, but David Dondero's seventh LP shuffles around, hands in pockets. It's easy to like Simple Love despite its faux-shucks posturing. Love is another thing, though: Despite Dondero's wry, self-deprecating lyrics, fresh touches of piano, and bare instrumentation, Simple Love's simple drumming and lackadaisical strumming make some songs interchangeable.

Bright Eyes has named Dondero as an influence, and though Conor Oberst has evolved into a broader artist, he still approximates Dondero's vocal style. Those quavering vocals inject emotion into Simple Love, but compulsory vocal tremors start to grate after awhile here, just as they often do with Oberst's work. Dondero aims for a sincerity that Oberst sometimes lacks, though. And, as on his last album, South of the South, Dondero sometimes forces a clever line between the joints of his songs, disrupting their natural flow for a moment of self-satisfaction (another trait he shares with Oberst).

Unlike that last LP, however, Dondero has added tinges of jazz to enliven his plaintive songs. Next to the lyrical references (he quotes Charlie Parker and claims to worship at the Church of John Coltrane-- a real place-- on standout track "Rothko Chapel", also real), pianist Eddy Hobizal dusts tracks with jazz runs. Hobizal quotes Dizzy Gillespie's "Salt Peanuts" as he enters "Double Murder Ballad Suicide" and his fleet bop runs snake through the rest of the track.

Dondero's detailed descriptions are still the best thing about him. He's able to evoke a complete experiential landscape: suicide bridges, dark, cool churches, muddy rivers. Still, he sometimes seems at odds with his own cleverness. On "Simple Love" he asks, "How can you say that you trust him/ You don't even like his music" and his smirk's audible. "Rothko Chapel" is partially about love, but mostly about authenticity-- of churches, of music, and of people-- though the title track finds that the latter two are one in the same.

"You Don't Love Anyone" is on the same topic but doesn't work as well-- Dondero complains about a siliconed and collegened woman who ends up not even loving him because he doesn't have any cash. Such trite observations don't work-- Dondero's insistence on painting his target in such broad strokes undercuts any narrative interest the song has going for it. More nuanced laments, such as "When the Heart Breaks Deep", are much better, though he is still singing about fake, lying women. Thematically, musically, and lyrically all of Dondero's songs are easy to place within the continuum of traditional American music-- country, blues, bebop, and "Sister Ray" are all concatenated here. For all his ability to recombine these sounds, though, Dondero sometimes sounds hard put to add anything of his own.