Stu Basham

When you do it yourself, you get to showcase your talents — but also your faults. Here we have the good and the bad of Stu Basham. He wrote the songs, played most of the instruments, sings and presumably produced. And while he is a talented piano and keyboard player and a decent guitarist, the inescapable truth is that Basham cannot sing. His voice is constantly flat, almost tuneless and incapable of carrying songs in the naked, front-and-center context in which he presents them. He fares somewhat better during the few moments that he dresses them up with effects, but these are few and far between. His songs offer the occasional compelling riff or instrumental phrase, but they’re forced to labor under Basham’s artless vocals, which pretty much kills their potential.