Lost and Profound’s latest album, Goodbye Mine, is a melting pot of different genres displayed at varying levels. It is the project of two creative musicians with powerful voices yet the overall result is somewhat boring and colourless.
The album opens with Superhuman, which by itself is not a bad song. In fact none of the songs, when taken alone, are dreadful. But altogether they take on a shapeless, never-ending quality.
Tracks one through four all seem to follow the same whimsical, indie pop pattern. With all being soft and melodic, and without much change in tone or tempo between them, the experience quickly stales.
Finally Iodine and Jewel, the fifth and sixth tracks pick up the pace a little bit to more of a slow rock vibe.
Portions of the instrumentals in Iodine and the accompanying singers in Jewel Harken a psychedelic 1966-1970’s Beatles and 1973 Lynyrd Skynyrd Free Bird sound. It’s known lyricist/guitarist/producer Terry Tompkins worked to bring a psychedelic component to the CD and pay tribute to some of his own influences from the ’70s.
The soft rock aura continues with Bad Sister, the seventh song on the album, which carries on the moody ambiance that grew onward from the beginning of song one. The music now portrays more of an edge, which is an improvement from the monotony of the first four.
However, everything is still slow and dreary and the tempo of the album never really does change.
The lyrics of the songs tell stories of love and loss and are quirky, honest and insightful, which generally works well with indie pop/rock music. However, they’d be more impactful and successful if they were more enduring and present.
Alcohol, the eighth track on the album, has the perfect accompanying music, so haunting and lonesome with that harmonica stringing its pain through the foreground. But the music overpowers the lyrics, which take a conscious effort to tune into.
The first half of the album was very indie-pop while the second half introduces a few more elements along the lines of soft rock and mysticism.
The 10th and final song of the album, Spectre, is moody, breathy and melancholy in all the right ways. Despite holding as dark of an ambiance, if not darker, as the other songs, Spectre projects an energy the other songs lack, making it by far the best Goodbye Mine has to offer.
Goodbye Mine holds an overreaching theme of loss and the band’s signature is melancholy-infused pop rock. The duo did stick to their set theme well — and reaching that goal without falling off track and muddying the message is a feat to celebrate — but with nothing to break up the homogenization of the album everything begins to run together and and product is a long, heavy chunk of music that’s uninspiring and hard to grasp.
However, both Tompkins and lead singer Lisa Boudreau’s voices are powerful, evoking and angelic. And completely undersold on this album where the instruments take center-stage most of the time, leaving the lyrics lost on the sidelines.