Steve Cunningham – Music From Mister Steve

You might think that a debut album from a mainstay of the Neutral Ground Coffee House scene would be filled with singer-songwriter fluff sans electricity, but Steve Cunningham, the local rock vet who today’s boho crowd knows better as Mister Steve, has decided to go even more old-school and make a real album, beats and all. And if you doubt his seriousness, know that he went to Abbey Road—yes, that one—to master it. There’s even a lyric booklet.

Which is good, because Steve’s also crafted an old-fashioned concept album, or at the very least a song cycle, about small-f faith and what it means when it’s tested.

His characters (and Cunningham may be one of them) are forever caught between where they’ve been and where they’re going, and since he often takes pains to point out that they’re the same place, the subtext is easy to figure. Steve’s got not one but two songs ostensibly about folks being turned away from a big gate. You do the math.

The music, while usually centered in Steve’s dreadnought, is paradoxically light-handed, his hushed vocals being the only clue at the restlessness of these lives. Which, rooted as they often are in the tenuous existence of a post-Katrina world, are ever roaming, desperate for a safe place to end up.

His production’s not unlike modern day white-boy R&B, airbrushed and pristine with only the most basic of rhythms, the kind of pop classicism found on Paul McCartney’s post-millennial albums or anything with the Eels name on it.

That could just be the wistfulness talking, but as a soundtrack for existential horror, Music from Mister Steve delivers the bad news about as nicely as you’d want.