Album review: Dawes, Stories Don't End (Hub/Mercury)

With their soft-rock style coloured with tints of country, Dawes' previous two albums have presented them as hugely talented inheritors of a West Coast/Laurel Canyon tradition of which The Eagles remain the most famous exponents. The same still applies to Stories Don't End, but the bloom has gone slightly off the rose this time. It's hard to pinpoint why: Taylor Goldsmith remains a capable songwriter, and the band retain an apparently effortless command of both the core country-rock mode and the crisp, smooth AOR glide of Fleetwood Mac. But after a while the regretful, melancholy tone wearies one's sympathies: as the title track puts it, “Stories don't end, they go on and on, it's just someone stops listening”.

Download: Just Beneath the Surface; From a Window Seat; From the Right Angle