Kasher’s ‘game’ plays with creativity

Overall, “The Game of Monogamy” is another creative success from Tim Kasher, gratuitously implementing lively and interesting strings and horns as well as light acoustic works.

“Monogamy’s” track list runs the entire gamut of quality, containing a few extraordinary songs, a few mediocre ones and unfortunately, a few awful ones, too. The poor songs all suffer from the same problem of complaining without being charming, making them hard to stomach yet somehow understandable given the album’s nature.

For instance, in “A Grown Man,” Kasher grumbles about responsibilities and yells things like, “A grown man’s gotta bring home the bacon.” Perhaps the monotonous and cliched lines are meant to be uncomfortable to convey the sentiment (but perhaps it’s just bad writing). Thankfully, we aren’t left to wonder too often because except for those few misses, the collection is a poignant rendition of midlife crises.

The horn sections add an upbeat flair to gloomy topics, and eventually Kasher is able to leave listeners with the feeling that they have triumphantly lifted themselves out of their melancholy and frustration with this catharsis, especially with the line, “I’m gonna write another chapter.”

Hopefully, there are many more chapters left for this artist’s already prolific career, so long as he’s ripping the right pages out of his diary.