I've needed some soft sounds lately. Anything too aggro starts to churn my guts and gives me a tummyache. Mr. Wright is a soothing substance, sliding into my ear canals and down to my esophagus, coating my stomach. (Okay, that's gross.) Some of it splashes into my brain, numbing the back of my head. Though, that numbness could be due to me lying in the bathtub for going on about three hours now. My spine has become one with the imitation porcelain.

Yes, Kevin Wright makes ideal music for falling asleep to in the bathtub. (Warning to impressionable young minds: do not fall asleep in the tub. Didn't you see Nightmare on Elm Street? On another topic, why don't horror movies have monsters anymore? Why is it all riddles and helping the ghosts? Helping ghosts isn't scary. Before we leave these parentheses, let me remind you that the subject is Mr. Wright's music and falling asleep in the tub.) As the water bobs, I imagine the waves of the sea.

See, the ocean is a repeated theme on this album. Mr. Wright is a sailor, free, as he asserts on Hello Is Anyone Out There's opening track, "Sailor on the Sea. He lives on "Ocean Boulevard." His lover lives by the sea, as we learn on "Darling Honey," a song about loving and knowing someone without knowing her name. This track, with its lilting verses and gently lifting (sounds like a brassiere, but it isn't) accordion phrase, stays in my head, tranquilizing me.

The Mr. Wright sound is simple and homogeneous throughout the record. An acoustic guitar strums basic chords, a keyboard blows like a zephyr, the drummer strokes the drums with his brushes, and Kevin Wright croons like the Divine Comedy's Neil Hannon. Wright avoids Hannon's histrionics, which could make him more palatable, but sometimes he's restrained to a fault. There are moments when the music gently surges and Wright sounds like he has the range to go for a high note, but instead sinks back into his wry, almost spoken baritone. Maybe he can't go anywhere else.

Another problem plaguing Is There Anyone Out There is its sameness. The tunes are smartly written, but they all stick with similar sounds and emotions. You want him to branch out-- hell, even do a bouncy showtune or something like Scott Walker sometimes launches into. Even the nice electric piano solo on "Ocean Boulevard" can't keep the song from slips beneath the gentle lapping waves.

On a sad note, as I was trying to dig up some information on this guy, I typed Is There Anyone Out There into a search engine. I came up with 186,000 entries, none having to do with Mr. Wright. Keep looking, people.

-Dan Kilian, September 28th, 2001