By Joshua Knopp/entertainment editor
With a total running time of 20 minutes, is this music even worth the CD it’s recorded on?
The Smoking Gun is the new extended play album by Nick Verzosa, a new face in the music industry having joined it full-time only two years ago. He has formed two bands thus far. The first, John’s Guns, released one album (Buy Sell Trade) and then retired, but his second, the Noble Union, looks to be sticking. The Smoking Gun, however, is a solo effort.
There’s reason to think Verzosa’s work will find an audience. He has a strong voice and uses it well. The guitar is also used with good ability. Every song in this album satisfies the basic requirements of a solid country song, and the listener’s enjoyment is proportional to their enjoyment of the genre in general.
This, however, is the best that can be said for the album. All five of the songs form yet another nauseating series of “you” love songs. Even with a credited co-writer, Verzosa couldn’t come up with another thing to sing about. Two in particular, “Let it Go” and “Back When Love Was Easy,” are being hailed as particularly “personal,” but how personal can they be to an author when placed in a field of similar material?
The most limiting factor of the album, however, is its runtime of just 19 minutes and 33 seconds. The cost of the album doesn’t reflect the lack of actual music, either. Downloading the album from Amazon costs $4.52, but downloading an album with three times the runtime is $5.99 from the same site. And this comparison doesn’t account for the quality of music in big-boy albums, which is likely to appeal to a much broader audience than The Smoking Gun.
In the end, there is no reason to buy this. Even if you fit into the narrow window it aims to reach, even if you feel that Verzosa’s music is better than the myriad of other artists who target the same window, there is no reason why you should not wait for a real album to come out.
