Album Notes

GEORGIA STRAIGHT MAGAZINE-
Vancouver's terminally underrated songsmith Marq DeSouza revisits familiar territory on his second solo album. “More Than a Price” is rock with the emphasis on classic over modern, thank God, and “Solitaire Bound” is DeSouza's standard-issue stadium epic, now with more screaming mountaintop guitar and wind machines. It's like good Bon Jovi, if you can get your head around that. And since somebody's gotta write this stuff, it might as well be DeSouza, since he's so damn good at it.

Not insignificantly, he also has a way with a lyric, tossing off great lines as casually as he seems to patch these tunes together. In “The End of the Song” and the bombastic country-blues of “Absolute Duty (To Someone Like You)”—which wouldn't sound out of place on the last Raconteurs album—DeSouza's writing is so strong that you wonder if he's covering some lost classic rescued from his dad's 8-track collection. Elsewhere, “Lighter Than a Feather” and “Bar for the Broken-Hearted” feel suspended somewhere between country Stones and Wilco before the going got weird. Like his self-titled album from 2006, …Boyish Charms is a little recklessly produced, but it's urgent and brimming with energy—probably because DeSouza is principally concerned with just getting his songs out there. And indeed, if there were something like a Tin Pan Alley or a Brill Building in his 'hood, he'd have full-time work. Maybe it's time for the man to go hawking his tunes down in Los Angeles or Nashville