Philip Vandermost, Automatic August

Philip Vandermost’s Automatic August offers the world another collection of sunny songs from a singer/songwriter. The music is uplifting, for the most part with happy words, but the tunes are always jolly and in a major key. The album is short, ten tracks, the first a one-minute instrumental opener, and the thirty minutes fly by faster than Weezer’s Blue Album.

The song titles deal with nature and time and are included within the lyrics of every song. The lyrics are romantic, which is made extra sweet by the fact that Vandermost’s wife, Julie, took his picture for the inside of the CD case. The CD cover has a somewhat ominous-looking tree on the back, which might give a false impression of what music lies inside. A more cheery picture might better represent the smiling, hopeful songs Philip Vandermost compiled for this album.

Vandermost plays all the instruments himself, except the drums, and produced it himself, to boot. He writes the lyrics for tracks three, “So Hi,” and five, “Because,” while Robert Fulton wrote the rest. “Climb Aboard” has a Ben Kweller vibe to it, with cute piano and vocals. Though Vandermost is not British, his music sounds at times like Coldplay, his voice softly rising to hit his falsetto like Chris Martin’s, particularly on “Since Mountains have Risen.” This song stands as one of the better ones on the album, with its mellow instrumentation and confession, “I can merely offer / the truth of my name.”

Even when it seems like a song might be heading toward a darker place, it lifts back up, such as in “Time After Time” (not to be confused with Cindi Lauper’s famous ’80s tune), when he sings, “Spread your wings but / please don’t fly / Don’t fly too high / Without you I can’t, can’t survive / Time after time / Night after night / You light the way / from wrong to right.”

Maybe it’s because Vandermost himself only wrote two of the songs out of the nine with words, or maybe it’s because of how happy it stays, but something about this effort makes me feel like he should be categorized along with other well-known, predictable pop stars. Every song sits at about three standard minutes, provides a pretty standard guitar part, and includes typical lovey-dovey lyrics. The CD as a whole is not bad, by any means — it just might bore someone looking for more substance or true feeling behind what’s being said.