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San Francisco’s Train is nothing if not polished, their
full-bodied sound sculpted by longtime producer Brendan O’Brien into a
reasonable facsimile of the red-white-and-blue bar rock championed in the ’90s
by two birds of a similar feather, the Black Crowes and Counting Crows. Their
latest, For Me, It’s You, finds singer
Patrick Monahan and company serving up a familiar mix of sensitive ballads,
highlighted by “Cab,” a first-person account of a Big Apple taxi driver braving
the lonely city nights. It’s slick, shrewdly constructed pop, driven by a
perfectly inviting piano riff and Monahan’s gently pleading vocals, and like
many of the cuts on For Me, It’s You,
it represents the quintet’s most sophisticated work to date. But their sound
remains too processed, too safe. It’s lovely and all, just not very
interesting.
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