Ron Sexsmith Exit Strategy of the Soul by: Ed Butler Fri:01-Aug-08 Label: Yep Roc Year: 2008 WB rating 67 out of 100

Ron Sexsmith is, very nearly, critically unassailable. Irrespective of what particular genre he decides to plunder (and never departing too far from the template) the man sure can write a song. Having a rock-solid grip of melody and a smoky, yet limited, vocal range, also are inestimably helpful. His music is uniformly beige, but such a delightful shade of beige as to be beyond critique.

Sexsmith has never made any secret of his love of innocuous 80s AM radio R’n’B staples, and on Exit Strategy of the Soul he gives full flight to his most inoffensive urges. That he gets away with it can be put down almost entirely to the fact that he is Ron Sexsmith. Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine an album like this, in the hands of a lesser songsmith, coming across as anything short of excruciatingly, nauseatingly twee.

Coming on the heels of the excellent Retriever and Time Being, where Sexsmith couched intensely personal tales of urban melancholy and occasional flashes of uplifting anecdote in smooth, clean and ruthlessly precise pop music, Exit Strategy is, in his world, a sharp left turn. Although, in everyone else’s universe, a Sexsmith sharp turn is a gentle veer.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the recruitment of Latino horn players, who add Lionel Richie-style horns. This is the closest Exit Strategy comes to departing from the plan. The horns’ inability to quite capture the requisite banality is the record’s greatest saving grace. Not for want of technical knowhow, there is an intangible verve about their horn playing which is most likely accidental, a touch of residual cool that no amount of listening to ‘Hello’ can erase.

Despite this sonic banality, Sexsmith has always been adventurous lyrically. Here, though his verbal muse appears to have absented itself somewhat. ‘Hard Bargain’, from Retreiver, while not the most obtuse offering in his repertoire, at least employed a simple metaphor – like driving a hard bargain – to deliver a poignant tale of supportive love. On ‘One Last Round’, he waxes on the global warming concerns he apparently feels.

While busting out a similar metaphor – one last round of carbon-fuelled hyperconsumerism – Sexsmith lapses into near-unforgivable levels of cheese; “We’re leaving a scar on everything we’ve found/And we’re going into town for one last round.” It sounds for all the world like an ageing hippie who, granted, probably was warning everyone about this 20 years ago, but is now toting a cheap six-string and preaching the good environmental word in semi-literate prose.

Sexsmith’s lyrical sins, though, are easily obscured by the professionalism of his craft. The very first track, ‘Spiritude’, is the gentlest opening 92-second salvo you’re likely to hear on the strength of, once again, his extraordinary grasp of the finer points of melody. Turning what is a simple piano coda into a tune that can hold the attention by adding some wordless humming and acoustic guitar is a specialty of the man’s, and it is rarely more evident than here.

That said, Sexsmith’s trademark vanilla slowly fades across 14 songs. By ‘Dawn Anna’, the two minute counterpoint to ‘Spiritude’, with bonus saccharine strings, the prettiness has absolutely zero impact. If nothing else, Ron Sexsmith can stand as an object lesson to budding troubadours everywhere – that all the technical knowhow in the world can only stand in for so much inspiration. And, unlike 2001’s Blue Boy and Cobblestone Runway from the following year, Ron Sexsmith’s seems to have absented itself in some indefinable way. And perhaps that is the only thing on Exit Strategy of the Soul that is truly indefinable.