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Chet Faker – Built on Glass review

Chet Faker promo Image
Built on Glass was released April 11

Looking at Chet Faker, one would be hard pressed to guess that the musical output of the heavily bearded singer-songwriter, whose fashion sense blurs the line between hipster and hobo, is a smooth, sexy hybrid of soul and electronica. However Faker’s debut album Built on Glass is  just that, delivering 50-odd minutes of mood and atmosphere conducive to all things sensual. Played outside the bedroom however, the album isn’t quite the musical statement Faker might have intended it be.

Album opener ‘Release Your Problems’ presents Chet Faker at his very best – crooning his way through a bass-guitar led seduction song. It’s one of the few songs on the album not plagued by poor lyricism that may well be the album’s biggest flaw. Over the album, Faker manages to tell us he’s ‘a novel made resourceful’ and that ‘the stone has been thrown and the trust is dust’. While these may be two of the most glaring examples, much of the albums lyrical content teeters  between the inane and the clichéd.

Putting aside the sub-par lyrics, Built on Glass does contain some excellent songwriting. The mostly instrumental ‘Blush’ features a hypnotic electronic beat, which only gets better as the song progresses, the waltzy 6/8 rhythm on ‘Dead Body’ is fantastic, and the simple-yet-effective pop song ‘To Me’ has so much radio potential that Faker’s management would be mad to not release it as a single.

While these songs are excellent, it’s disappointing to note the similarity the album bears to Faker’s last solo effort, EP ‘Thinking in Textures’. Almost any of the songs here would fit neatly on to it – only nothing on this album is as good as EP tracks ‘Everything I Wanted’ or ‘Terms and Conditions’. Furthermore, given the musical evolution Faker showed on his recent ‘Lockjaw’ collaboration with Triple J messiah Flume, it’s disheartening to see Faker has regressed to a certain extent on this new offering.

Despite its flaws, and its inferiority to Faker’s prior output, Built on Glass makes for great, if slightly forgettable mood music.

Chet Faker’s Built on Glass was released on April 11 through Future ClassicCheck out album track ‘To Me’ below:

Text by Jordan Hayne

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