Crashing in with the warm warble we all adored from his days in The Inbreds, Mike O’Neill’s This Is Who I Am helps to kick off this power pop gem of a disc. With over half of the 12 songs coming in at under three minutes, it’s like a disc out of another time, setting O’Neill as not a contemporary of Sloan or Joel Plaskett, but of Buddy Holly. Henry and She’s Good are Beatles-meets-schoolyard fun, while Calgary is a mellow plunker about a fictional Christian band. Closer One Pair of Shoes is a haunting pop classic, with delicate guitar, plinking glockenspiel and simplistically stunning vocals. This disc (his first since 2004’s The Owl) is diverse, lovely and beautifully self-recorded.

Published in Volume 66, Number 22 of The Uniter (March 7, 2012)