Nik Freitas
Heavy Mellow (Future Farmer)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in Space City Rock, Summer 2004

Whatever else can be said about Nik Freitas, his instincts as a musician and an arranger are kind of impeccable. Heavy Mellow is a remarkably economic one-and-a-half-man pop album (producer Aaron Estes contributed some guitar); it may be that once the nifty but mildly chaotic opener “Be Honest” runs its course, there’s not a single superfluous note on the rest of the disc. That doesn’t mean that Heavy Mellow is spare and skeletal, though, just that even when the riff of “Careful What You Choose” is played on harmony guitars and “Cheaters” builds to a multi-layered pop symphony (with a theme played on what sounds like a piano/glockenspiel combo), Freitas avoids a lot of the frilleries that characterize even quality popsters like Matthew Sweet and Jonny Polonsky, to say nothing of Jason Falkner. The best songs, like the unbitter romantic farewell “Penny,” benefit from each instrument playing nothing more than just what needs to be played, while Freitas sings in a voice that has the timbre of Bob Dylan with none of the affectation (though the Highway 61 feeder road “Nursery Street” comes awfully close). Heavy Mellow’s a modest pleasure, to be sure, but it’s canny enough to remember that modesty’s a virtue.

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