The author and critic Dorothy Parker once famously said of a performance by Katharine Hepburn, "She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B." Robert Edwards of
the Library Trust is lucky Mrs. Parker isn't around to review his debut album, because
The A to Z of Mathematics makes that emotional gamut sound downright expansive. This is a stultifying, deadening album that consists of little more than Edwards' mewling, frequently off-key voice and simplistic acoustic guitar figures performing blandly miserablist tunes about himself (really, really sensitive) and the world (really, really mean and awful). The single "My Town on TV" is sadly indicative of the album as a whole, a litany of forced metaphors and clichéd emotions about the economic death of a city that sounds like the work of a naïve teenager upset because there's a Wal-Mart opening down the road. Musically, the songs are so alike that the album's brief running time (just under 25 minutes) stretches out like an eternity of blandness. There is little to recommend this album to anyone but the most devotedly mopey emo kid. ~ Stewart Mason