Swaying with a weighty harmony as bulky as it is attractive, we find the gorgeous trappings of a throwback slow jam in “Storage,” one of the eight brand new, single-worthy songs comprising the new album +11 Hours by Conor Maynard. Maynard is bringing the melodic thunder like few others in the indie scene are this season, and not just in swinging numbers like this one. +11 Hours is a profoundly experimental album that spins in more directions than some fans will be able to keep up with, but for those with a taste for the eclectic, it’s a hard record to top this June.
The first thing that I noticed upon sitting down with this record was its danceable energy; even in the centralized “I’m Here Forever” and plodding “Enemies,” resisting the urge to sync up with the rhythm of our singer’s heart can be difficult, to say the least. The grooves are as big as they come in Maynard’s radio-ready takes like “By Your Side,” “Dark Side,” and the aforementioned “If I Ever” – truth be told, “A Different Way” is probably the only tune here that lacks any specific instrumental power, although it makes up for this with one of the more moving lead vocals I’ve heard all year long.
Despite the uptrend in surreal themes among indie players in the last three years or so, +11 Hours boasts a remarkably straightforward, unfanciful construction that doesn’t allow for pop postmodernity. “How Am I” and “I’m Here Forever” are the only two tracks that come close to touching on this kind of ground, but even at their most avant-garde in style, there’s scarcely a moment where either sound even remotely tethered to an alternative movement in the YouTube music community. Conor Maynard strikes me as the kind to follow the beat of his own drum, and that alone makes his latest work quite an interesting listen this season.
“By Your Side,” “Storage,” and “If I Ever” each have more of a textural expressiveness than they do any sort of poetic simplicity, but I think that was necessary to establish a lot of heat in the first half of this LP. Fluidity is an underrated feature in any album, and in the case of +11 Hours, it’s the catalyst for every sensational moment that comes as we move from one song to the next. Though Maynard is a new face to a lot of us, the project doesn’t sound all that obscure when listening to these well-polished studio cuts.
Desperate times don’t necessarily have to call for desperate measures; in fact, I think that this disciplined effort from Conor Maynard essentially proves as much. Rather than trying to wow us with a lot of showy cosmetics exclusively, this artist layers as many different tones and influences together as would be acceptable for a modern LP and allows us to engage with the content more intellectually as a result. I’m tempted by what this record could lead to, and something tells me that after you hear it this month, you’ll likely share my sentiments.
Troy Johnstone