Landon Lloyd Miller – Light Shines Through (EP)
Twin Mesa
– out March 4
3 / 5
Texas-based Landon Lloyd Miller’s biggest asset is his chameleon’s sense of folk. His debut EP, Light Shines Through, is an accumulation of colors of style close enough in shade to cohere into one single, impressive animal—we mean album.
What do we mean by a chameleon sense of folk? “Feel It Again” is very clearly the loopy, playful shade of M Ward’s folk. Miller’s voice channels M Ward to a tee, and when you set these vocals to the same long, lingering blues stride, there’s a strong chance you might double check your music player to make sure you’re on the right EP. “Sunglasses” and “String My Love Down” are polar opposites; the former slow boils into a rock chorus (slow boils rather quickly, running at 3:11) and the latter a mopey lament paired with piano. Miller clearly has a lot of tools in his folk belt for a debut EP—a jack of all trades, one could say—yet we want to see quite where he has mastered his craft. One lament: while his songs hit where they should in the brief time he gives them (2-3 minutes each), the songs themselves aren’t exceptional in terms of the genre. These songs run from passable to good, and exceptional nor deeply special, they aren’t—at least not yet. And a second lament, that Light Shines Through is ambiguously marketed as a debut album, neither EP nor LP. We’ve made the distinction that it is an EP, with nine songs running at 26:14. Hopefully, when Miller puts together an LP, he will take the extra space given him to expand his songs and challenge himself outside of his very limiting pop-length comfort zone.
A debut that could promise another great singer-songwriter in an upcoming LP. Intriguing, but for now, take a pass.