The odd friendship that formed and blossomed between John Lennon and Harry Nilsson in the early Seventies and the specifically downbeat music it inspired from both parties still casts a shadow, even almost fifty years on.
Such is almost immediately apparent from a cursory listen to Due North from Kansas City's Liam Kazar. It pretty much could be a Nilsson album, given its recognisable traits of flawed masculinity, wry cynicism, but all underpinned by an essential doomed romaticism.
Kazar has worked with Jeff Tweedy and Steve Gunn and that makes sense. There's something of that fluent American everyman virtuosity about the record. It's very comfortable in its own skin even, while it shrugs its shoulders to its failings in terms of its dealings with the opposite sex.
This is a very likeable record, which knows its genre and applies itself to it. There are echoes of early Steely Dan too and generally it finds and sticks to its groove with is distinctly a mid 1972 mindset. There are worse places to be and Due North makes it seem like an altogether wonderful place for the course of its running time.
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