*½
JAMES ROSS
If I Could Take the Blame (2003)
RCA Records

Since his 1999 debut with ROOT FOR THE UNDERDOG, singer-songwriter James Ross has been building a devoted cult following but has largely been ignored by the mainstream press, to say nothing of the pop charts. All that should change with his first major-label album, IF I COULD TAKE THE BLAME, and the hit stripped-down cover of the Doors' "Love Me Two Times" that is already making its way up the adult-contemporary charts.

Ross is almost invariably concerned with the women in his life; his delicately but incompetently picked guitar is his weapon against a hamhanded sense of loneliness; as he sings on "Since the Accident," an account of incredible loss resulting from a divorce, "I'm no stranger to failure / We're well acquainted."

Musically, he's content to leave things bare despite occasionally opting for a slight worldbeat veneer. His vocals run the gamut from sensitive-male crooning to sensitive-male screaming; he seems about to pass out on the angry cut "Dumped, Dragged, and Bewildered."

What mars his work is not so much his emotional instability as his fascination with it and his attempts at wit and warmth in bringing it to the forefront. He's not much of a rocker -- "(You're) My Universe" makes Dave Matthews sound edgy -- and worse yet, he's stuck in high school, with not one or two or three but four songs about the pains of adolescence, "We Are Free" (the "Praise You" or "Here's to the Night" graduation anthem of the year, no doubt), "One of the Boys," "Alienated," and "It Hurts More Every Day."

Ross' lyrics are rarely the least bit engaging. "My parents sent me to death camp / I couldn't last a day" is as clever as he gets, and I thank god he doesn't try harder. More typical is his rather misogynistic barking on "Lazy Girl," the opener: "Rosa I wish you could come home / I want to tell you I love you / Where is my Rosa? / I miss her." I hesitate to even mention the icky chorus -- "I miss you Rosabee!" Ross apologizes for "all the humdrum crap" and the "rainy-day doldrums" he's subjected her to and wants to "be one with you again." Stay away, Rosa!

This would all be fairly inoffensive -- no worse than John Mayer, Ben Kweller, Jeffrey Gaines, or any other suicidal moron anyway -- if not for his guitar playing, which is essentially intolerable and leads one to grow mystified about the motivations of his massive fan base. Are they a bunch of hobos who want free t-shirts? Ross lacks the capability to offer any degree of significant communication with them; his singing, competent though it is, is impossibly bland. My conclusion is that everyone who listens to this bullshit is in college, which numbs the taste and senses, or stoked on pot, which simply obliterates them. I reached the same conclusion about Matthews, Mayer, Kweller and everyone in their monotonous subgenre long ago -- including founding fathers Cat Stevens and Jim Croce.

But okay, he really crosses the line at one point, with the unbearably wrongheaded "Buddy Guy Was Right," just another breakup song here with an attempt to play blues (completely vain) and pretend to know who Buddy Guy is (it doesn't come off).

Like all performers of this type, Ross deserves to be immediately forgotten and I hope his success falters and he'll never, ever come back. But as long as there are nuts out there who follow Jimmy Buffett around on tour I guess there's an audience for everything. God fucking help us.


Tracklist:
1. Lazy Girl
2. We Are Free
3. Love Me Two Times
4. Dance Under the Sun
5. (You're) My Universe
6. Since the Accident
7. One of the Boys
8. Buddy Guy Was Right
9. Trying to Understand
10. Alienated
11. Dumped, Dragged and Bewildered
12. It Hurts More Every Day
13. Lost