The Last of Seven, solo album by Pat Monahan is an excellent easy-to-listen collection of familiar songs.
Monahan announced his intentions for a solo piece last February and The Last of Seven was released Sept. 18.
It is a remarkable rendition of recent rock/pop style. Monahan has named the album in an endearingly personal manner, as the title denotes his place in his large family. Monahan was born in Waterford, Pa., the last of seven’ children.
You may recognize his name from his role as the lead singer in the Grammy Award- winning band Train. He heads up the San Francisco band as lead vocalist, although he also plays percussion and guitar.
Monahan started his career in music as a member of a Led Zeppelin cover band before joining Scott Underwood, Jimmy Stafford, Brandon Bush and Johnny Colt in Train. After the tour for Last of Seven, Monahan plans on returning to the band.
Monahan offer 14 songs of Train-styled music in his CD. Listeners of The Last of Seven will be horridly disappointed if they are looking for musical variation s from song to song, or any climatic point in the album.
Especially toward the end of the collection, songs tend to mesh stylistically.
Songs such as “Always Midnight” and “The Great Escape,” (conveniently placed back-to-back) only differ in a small underlying piano riff.
The token piece on the CD is the second track “Her Eyes.” This song features Patrick Leonard, who is known for his work with stars such as Madonna, Elton John and Roger Waters.
This song holds the album’s claim to fame as it secured the 13th slot on the Hot AC chart. During the week of Oct. 14 alone it had 1,587 plays on the radio with 6.575 million listeners tuning in. The music video is currently No. 8 on the VH-1 top 20 video countdown.
One of the redeeming qualities of the album is Monahan’s interesting lyric. Although not awe-inspiring, they offer certain catch phrases that make his music unique.
The album opens with the title song “The Last of Seven” and the opening line “Two money makers/ One fallen star/ Three more that swam ashore then climbed into the family car.”
Although he does not break from his proclaimed Last of Seven style, he does team up with English pop star Graham Nash for the song “Cowboys and Indians,” the fifth song on The Last of Seven.
Surprisingly, the song takes an oddly country feel opening with a classical guitar riff and Monahan singing. It is the closest the CD comes to breaking from expectations.
In short, Rolling Stone magazine summed up the work perfectly by saying “In the era of downloads, Monahan could have done much worse.”
The CD is a definite buy for the Train enthusiast or the ‘has everything’ music lover.
For the rest of us, the good songs will be playing on the radio this winter.
