ONE WE MISSED: Miller Yule: Let it Burn (bandcamp)

This mainstream rock album by Auckland's Miller Yule arrived at the end of September when Elsewhere was swamped by other projects, so we missed it.

But given it works some timeless guitar-rock tropes and is in a lineage which is familiar and comfortable for many, it's not too late to consider it.

Hip-hop, R'n'B, grime and other idioms may have changed the definition of a “song” – and certainly what we used to call song structure – but Yule cleaves to the old values of verses and choruses, guitar breaks and dynamics which move from rhythmic, throbbing up-close intensity to full-throated fury over a wall of six-strings.

He also writes tight songs – just one of these 10 originals breaks the four minute mark – and the themes are those we've known for decades: that first serious love, commitment, change, heartbreak . . . flight and regret.

Produced by Greg Haver (who also drums here) and with the band of guitarist Tom Healy, keyboard player Stephen Small and Mike Hall on bass, singer-guitarist Yule engages himself with songs with their roots in, and influences from, artists like John Mellencamp, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, Jakob Dylan and even those Middle America stadium acts which get the lighters/phones waving in the air.

There's a loose but interesting song cycle here which weaves the various facets of finding someone and almost obsessive love and need (Dynamite, Evergreen with a pure Americana image of “you got a feeling like a movie scene, your polka-dot skirt and my blue jeans”) to love in the comfort zone (Easy which reads like a message never posted, “there's no other man on your Instagram . . . it's got me thinking like, maybe baby, I might have a chance”).

Then we are onto the break-up with the bleak and eloquently simple lyrics of disappointment on the Petty-like ballad Nothing.

Later there's a quieter alt.country consideration of brotherhood and support from an outside voice (Hold On) then looking back with the desperation of Wishing Well: “remember back when we were seventeen . . . I put all my money on a shooting star”.

And finally a bracket of songs at the end which address more personally damaging issues: the country-rock Going Away about the flight to elsewhere; the fear of loneliness and isolation on Wake Up which steps off from a mid-period Springsteen backdrop (“I'm afraid of being alone/my own home”).

And right at the end -- as curtain come down -- we find the broken lover in a state of confusion on the quieter, thoughtful and nakedly emotional final track Tangled Up: “All alone, uncharted ground . . . So just give me a little patience, I don't want to hear about my replacement . . . you're all tangled up in my mind, 'cause I gave you all my loving . . .”

Then in a forgiving voice, “I hope you're happy with the choice you made”.

Effortlessly shifting between the various facets of the lineage he's in – blown-out rock, downbeat country-rock, introspective country-folk – Yule clearly doesn't feel the need to reinvent these idioms because they speak to -- and for -- him.

As they've done for many others over decades.

So he may not reinvent the wheel, but at times on Let It Burn, Miller Yule's particular wheel is on fire.

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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here