On 2005's
Haughty Melodic,
Mike Doughty took steps to move away from his purely acoustic solo material, bringing in piano and horns to fill out his sound.
Golden Delicious stretches even further into radio-friendly adult alternative, and in fact little resembles the singer's earlier work. "27 Jennifers," which was originally found on the 2003 EP
Rockity Roll, is revisited here, with added electric guitars and a swirling keyboard solo that might have come straight out of 1986, and the song ends up being one of the better ones on the album. Elsewhere, many of the melodies and arrangements are similar (the first two tracks, for example, "Fort Hood" and "I Just Want the Girl in the Blue Dress to Keep on Dancing," are nearly identical, except the former's chorus chooses to borrow from
Galt MacDermot's "Let the Sunshine In," while the latter riffs on "The Little Drummer Boy"), but there are still moments on
Golden Delicious that show what
Doughty is capable of. For example, he holds back on the production and instrumentation and lets his acoustic guitar chords and voice take over in the darker "I Got the Drop on You," which references his
Soul Coughing days while still coming across as an original. And while "More Bacon Than the Pan Can Handle" is intended as a nod to his love of hip-hop and sampling but is pure kitsch instead, there are other songs -- the aforementioned "I Got the Drop on You," the
Death Cabby "Wednesday (No Se Apoye)," even "I Wrote a Song About Your Car" -- that successfully demonstrate
Doughty's abilities. ~ Marisa Brown