Zillions, The - Play! Zeuxis: Xight? Zeen (Album)
Nick Craft's latest offering comes in the form of The Zillions, a once solo project that now incorporates Rohan Thomas, Ben Mason and Jim Watts.
It's been a while in the making. Nick has been playing around with concept of The Zillions for about 8 years now. This is his first album since Sidewinder wound up about 10 years ago.
I'm not sure about the title of this. As far as I can make out Zeuxis was an ancient Greek painter, Xight- I have no idea and Zeen, all I could find was some urban dictionary stating it means to agree with something.
The artwork reminds me of scribling in a graph book at school during subjects that didn't do much to stimulate your interest. Fun, interesting, but maybe not album worthy.
But back to the album itself...
With his voice melodically floating along with the tunes, Nick's latest musical adventure takes us on a pleasant little journey, but it never actually reaches any particular destination. It seems happy to just drift along at a mediocre pace, not offending anyone, but not going anywhere exciting either.
It opens strongly with Shade,its hypnotic lyrics being full of promise. Back in Your Arms was a great little track, probably my favourite.
Yet the rest of the album failed to deliver.
And Being There probably could have stopped around the 3 minute mark.
It's not that it's a bad album, I just found it a little uninspiring. It's more like pleasant background music. It was all a little fuzzy and bland.
However, it does have a certain enchanting feel to it and it may grow on me with more listens. I know there have been CDs in my collection that I hated the first time I heard them, but have grown to become some of my favourites.
Music is an art forms where the listener brings a lot of themselves into the picture when they listen.The mood they are in, the life experiences they've had, can all affect whether certain songs have an impact on them. And we all have particular genres that appeal to us more than others. So, I'm not willing to write this CD off just yet.
But...when I downloaded this to my iTunes, I was a little amused as the band's genre classification came up as "unclassifiable." Guys, seriously... If you don't think your music can be confined to a particular genre, just leave it blank. Otherwise it sounds just a little wanky.
