Imaad Wasif

Imaad Wasif

[3/5] Imaad Wasif’s name may not ring a bell, but most of the bands he’s been associated with should: Lowercase, alaska!, the New Folk Implosion, and now, Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Here, Wasif has stepped out on his own and made a stripped-down ode to disappointment, deception and most everything else that leads to anguish; and, as Wasif describes it halfway through the album, “Holding on to the blade/I’m leaving, baby.” The music follows suit, traveling down a dark, lonely and mysterious path (at its best, traces of Red House Painters can be heard lurking about), but it has a hard time hitting the kind of peaks required to make a singer-songwriter disc truly memorable. Wasif gets extra points for avoiding clichés and making something that never sounds forced (even when he’s delivering rote lines like “You can always find a friend/to hurt you when you’re down”), but in the end, these 11 songs would work best as the background music for a movie without a happy ending.
(KILL ROCK STARS) Marc Hawthorne