Maverick Sabre, Innerstanding - album review

Download: Give It Up; Walk into the Sun; Give Me Love

Innerstanding

Maverick Sabre’s follow-up to Lonely Are the Brave is an ambitious but ultimately unsatisfying work.

While one sympathises with his social anxieties, they need addressing with more energy and invention.

A track like “So Free” should leap from the heart, but the tedious maundering about the plight of “little kids with big sticks in projects” is the kind of clichéd stuff done so often, and so much better, by so many before.

The model is clearly What’s Going On?, but Innerstanding lacks the redemptive lightness of spirit; even the love songs are tragic and self-pitying, so it’s a huge relief to find Sabre, by track nine, “Walk into the Sun”, acknowledging “I’ve spent too much time concentrating on the negative”.

It skates along lightly, but then he’s immediately back into misery, “Falling Again”. Sure, we’re all down in some sense, but surely music is better deployed to alleviate suffering, not indulge it?