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Album Details

• Artist: Rob Szabo
• Album: A Battery of Tests
• Label: indie
• Year of Release: 2003
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: dscanland on 2003-11-19

Now, if you are like me, you would have looked over to the side there and seen Jeff Buckley in the Try If You Like section and gone, "That's all we need, is another Buckley wannabe". Now I took careful liberation in handing out that comparison. Rob Szabo's voice is not really as similar to Buckley as some other imitators. In fact, I gave that comparison more for the song arrangements than anything. Szabo has come up with some very interesting songscapes that take you away for a little while. Rob recorded this album over a year spent in seclusion in his downtown Toronto apartment. He took on pretty much every duty involved in the album, with final mixing help from his friend Cal Brunker. The album starts out with a gentle, Elliott Smith style song called "Watchin A Movie". It is actually one of the album highlights and my advice to Rob would be to continue down this path. "Trampoline" continues this feel with a little more upbeat track and some clever guitar playing. The song "Eye For An Eye" really highlights Szabo's singing abilities with it's emotionally ladened lyrics. One of the couple faux pas' that Szabo has included on A Batter of Tests is the track "If I Could Do It All Again". Listening to that song makes me think back to Mr. Big or Extreme. Yikes! There are a few other songs that don't really seem to fit on the album. This has me thinking that if Szabo took another year and did some more picking and choosing A Battery of Tests would have been a complete experience rather than this fractured album.

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