So, this is a review of the new album. Not so positive, but I have met a few people who seemed to like it. (Btw, there's some tracks from the new album available to be previewed at http://www.wbar.org/?q=playlist/456/5985 .)

The following was reproduced with the permission of the author:





Your Favorite Album (Not)
by Anne Animosa (who would rather not have her real name associated with ever having heard of this CD)

Your Favorite Album is not, never has been, and never will be your favorite album. In fact, despite that he recorded each track entirely on his own with him playing every instrument, rock-pianist Jonah Rank's newest release is probably the most misleading title to be released in the music industry anytime this millennium.

The album opens with the corny and incoherent "Mount Sermon", a bumpy church-like-organ solo piece that is so poorly arranged, the listener may wish Rank had learned at least some form of intelligent design (since, for the sake of aesthetic architectonics, no listener in the right mind wants to hear an organ imitating a broken record halfway through a 10-plus-minute solo, and no classical or jazz listener cares to hear a classical piece turn into a ragtime piece). After the organ dies out (after a pathetically over-dramatic and over-extended search for the most beautiful cadence to end with), the listener's attention turns to "East Carolina On the West", four and a half painful minutes of Rank's mediocre and scratchy banjo playing. The track is so atrociously inconsiderate of appealing to any audience that one does not need to listen too carefully to hear the notes that Rank is trying to hit and inadvertently missing. It says very little for a CD when, by the second of the eighteen tracks, the listener wishes the artist had already given up and just stuck to his main instrument.

The third track, "The Electric Couch" (these titles are so bizarre, I could not be making them up), is an interesting but very short solo on bass guitar. The listener honestly wonders why, when Rank can actually play bass well, he chooses to create a track that is so short that it almost sounds like it was recorded as album-filler material; and yet, why would an album with more tracks than any standard pop album need any fillers at all? Or maybe it's that all of the tracks that run too long on this godawful album are there to allow Jonah to release the very few surprising minutes of listenable material he recorded for Your Favorite Album. After the unfortunate transience Jonah turned "The Electric Couch" into, the listener is now sentenced to listen to "Dental Breakdown", a drum solo that sounds more like the product of a deaf 5-year old at a drumset than an actual musician.

If the listener has not turned the CD off yet, then Jonah now subjects the listener to his horrid scratchy violin-playing on "No Hindsight In Reach (No Lessons Taught)". Despite whatever the nonsensical title could mean, it is a sad fact that, in hindsight, Jonah actually has admitted to having taken violin lessons, yet he still plays in a way that not only mimics a dying cat, but would probably encourage any feline to commit suicide (nine times if necessary). As Jonah's violin fortunately (albeit perhaps abruptly) dies out, he turns to the harmonica in "Blue and Green (No Time)", a track so harrowing from microphone problems it actually sounds like Jonah put no time or effort into it. One must wonder if albums like these were ever played in an Abu-Ghraib prison. If not, the U.S. Army should consider replacing corporal punishment with Your Favorite Album.

Speaking of the Middle East, the next track is in fact titled "Ancient Near Eastern Holiday Blues" - a track of improvisation on a shofar (a Middle Eastern instrument made of a ram's horn) that is so boring and repetitive, the listener will actually be amazed that Jonah was awake enough to record this far into the album. A final shofar blast leads into "The Electric Fuzzy Couch", seemingly a sequel to "The Electric Couch" since this later track is also played on bass guitar - but with a fuzz-distortion effect very much akin to the heavy sounds of much to the work of the former Ben Folds Five. The only difference is that "The Electric Fuzzy Couch", from the onset, sounds less like a song and more like a mere collection of sounds; the track begins with an introduction that, excepting timbre, has almost nothing musically in common with the remainder of the track. Jonah has proven that when given more than two minutes to record on a bass guitar, he actually isn't such a tolerable bassist after all. And just in case you hadn't had enough of Jonah's weak skills yet, Rank now provides us with "Yeah Yeah Yeah (Rock)", a juvenile drum solo that accidentally sounds like it was supposed to be the background to a song even more generic that the drum beat.

Regardless of whether the listener is still conscious, Jonah now offers over 9 minutes of incredibly annoying flute-playing over a series of four tracks: "Scenes From a First Grade Classroom", "Scenes From a Second Grade Classroom", "Scenes From a Third Grade Classroom", and - of course - "Scenes From a Fourth Grade Classroom". Next, though the album has already included plenty of Jonah's pathetic violin chops, Jonah presents a pizzicato "17th Century Blues" which, thankfully, is overall more tolerable and accurate in pitch than the former violin track.

In case we hadn't heard Jonah playing enough instruments yet (no matter his actual familiarity with the instruments), Jonah's next two tracks pretty much cover the scope of the tangible instruments on the album: "Still Lost" (performed so slowly, maybe it was that Jonah was lost on the electric guitar's fretboard the entire time - trying to find notes that sound like they almost fit together musically) and "Getting an F On a Breath Alcohol Test" (a trumpet solo whose title, I believe, speaks for itself very honestly). The album then closes with a short-but-semi-sweet acoustic guitar solo titled "On the New Paint" (almost parallel to the acceptable but short "The Electric Couch" from the beginning of the album) and "Beyond Green Hills", a piano solo filled with too many technical mistakes that it is difficult to say honestly that this is the track that even a diehard fan of Jonah Rank realistically could have been waiting for. However, it is easy to say that this is the track that anyone reviewing the album was waiting for.

When I listened to Your Favorite Album to write this review, I could not wait to stop listening to Your Favorite Album. Considering that Your Favorite Album is undoubtedly the most negligible album of 2007, I would recommend any listener in the right mind to avoid purchasing it; your money would be better spent on euthanasia.