On his debut album, the LA singer-songwriter Alex Izenberg harks back to a stuffy 1970s studio. Chamber pop is combined with a kind of off-ish folk reminiscent of English pre-glam. Unfortunately,his offerings don’t come with a similar level of showmanship. Instead, Izenberg’s breathy voice gets buried behind perfectly pleasant but usually banal instrumentation. It’s a style that is typified by jauntily bittersweet breakup song To Move On, which is slightly too polite for either infectious poptimism or emotional punch. Elsewhere, dreamily clunky piano ballads (Grace) vie with swelling orchestral pop (The Farm) and, on Hot Is the Fire, weirdly shimmying synths, to only mildly diverting effect.
Generally, the atmosphere is too annoyingly parpy and trudgingly dull to have the kind of nostalgic guilelessness executed so well on Tobias Jesso Jr’s similarly soft-rockish Goon. Listen closely and you’ll find some impressive sonic detail, but Harlequin isn’t exactly a spectacle.
