Scott Cook

Since 1997, native Edmontonian (although it really doesn't matter because he is a self-described "wanderer") Scott Cook has released six albums about the trials and tribulations of transience. To give the man a fair amount of credit, his songs are lovely, buoyant, fingerpicked and sung with a warm, pleasant cadence. But problems, namely, a fair amount of boredom, arise by the time the last song is reached and it becomes clear that all ten of these songs are essentially one very long tune. The album is full of numbers set in a motel room, wherein Cook is missing some girl, or under a moonlit sky, where Cook is missing some girl, or beside a campfire, where Cook is looking into the eyes of some girl and lamenting the fact that he will be missing her soon, because he's a wanderer and he's gotta keep ramblin' on. What makes the album especially irritating are the moments where Cook feeds political ideology into his lyrics. It takes masterful weaving to nestle words such as "porn," "corporate profit" and "chain store" into a folk song and get away with it, and Cook doesn't.