GOLDEN DELICIOUS - MIKE DOUGHTY
It may be his poppiest and slickest work to date, but “Golden Delicious” is more proof that Mike Doughty still knows where to make the melodies twist and turn to find the sweet spot among the ridiculous, the sublime and the sad. Opener “Fort Hood” is a deceptively boppy-sounding look at a soldier who’d rather “leave the mobs and the murder in a distant land” before throwing out choruses of “Let the sunshine in” and then lamenting that said soldier is no longer of the enviably innocent time when his biggest need is to “blast Young Jeezy with your friends in a parking lot.” It’s always a little tough to tell how much he’s kidding, but there’s certainly something sun-splashed about the zany scatting and “na na na’s” on “Put It Down” and his smiley reworking of “The Little Drummer Boy” on “I Just Want the Girl in the Blue Dress to Keep On Dancing.”
