“I don’t listen to a lot of contemporary music,” Donald Cumming has said, and his first solo album certainly backs up his assertion. After fronting the Virgins, one of the post-Killers bands who never made it, he’s embraced rock classicism with a passion: there’s quite a bit of Tom Petty in Out Calls Only, a certain amount of mellow late-60s rock (especially on the seven-minute centrepiece, Scarecrow), and a dash of confessional singer-songwriter material (as on the closer, Spanish Horses). Even the cover looks like a period piece, as if he’d tried to cross Darkness on the Edge of Town and Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly. What Out Calls Only lacks, though, is melodies that adhere: for all the carefully constructed mood and attention to detail in the arrangements, there are are no hooks the listener can’t wriggle free of. Maybe it’s meant to be understated, but Cumming could do with a little overstatement.
