Album: Jack Johnson, To The Sea (Brushfire)

Perhaps the unfathomable popularity of Jack Johnson has something to do with the enervated beach-bum languor of his music – like a portable holiday through which fans might escape the dreary everyday.

There is something inescapably lazy about To The Sea, from the under-powered arrangements to the way the songs sound like they fell together from what happened to be in Jack's head at the time. He slips so easily into tendentious, self-regarding banality – "black and white and right and wrong only live inside a song"; "I can't tell you anything but the truth", etc – and seems so disengaged from the sweat and application of creation that he forgets, in "From The Clouds", that he's already used the image of patience being stolen three songs earlier, in "No Good With Faces". Wake up, man!

DOWNLOAD THIS To The Sea; Only The Ocean