Daisy Jones & The Six - AURORA (Deluxe) (2023) [Hi-Res]

Set in the 1970s and loosely inspired by Fleetwood Mac, Taylor Jenkins Reid's best-selling novel Daisy Jones & the Six is the fictional account of the rise and fall of a prominent blues-rock band as revealed through interviews. An Amazon Studios miniseries adaptation was already underway by the time the book was published in 2019, with producers enlisting Blake Mills to construct the band's sound. To write the songs (25 in all appear in the series), Mills enlisted help from none other than Jackson Browne as well as figures like Phoebe Bridgers, Marcus Mumford, Madison Cunningham, and Roger Manning, among many others. The emerging 11-song soundtrack album doubles as the group's imagined debut, Aurora. It was performed by the show's band-camp-trained cast, led by Riley Keough as Daisy and Sam Claflin as Billy Dunne. (Suki Waterhouse, Josh Whitehouse, Will Harrison, and Sebastian Chacon round out the group's TV lineup, which diverges slightly from the book in number and by instrument.) Together with Mills' production, the star-studded writing team manage to settle into a dual-vocal-heavy MOR sound that's credible as the output of a single band at the same time that it touches on Laurel Canyon, Nashville, and, if fleetingly, Fleetwood Mac itself, as on the chorus of soft rock standout "Let Me Down Easy," a descendent of "Dreams." Another highlight is the rousing "Regret Me," which almost evokes the Heartbreakers with its efficient hooks, gritty guitar tones, organ, live energy, and slight affectation by Claflin. They let loose again with the bluesy garage rock of the Keough-led "More Fun to Miss," while quasi-acoustic ballads like "Two Against Three" and the trite "No Words" ("There ain't no words for the song I'm trying to write/Oh, I just don't know the words, babe, for what I'm trying to write/Everything I've tried so far, babe, doesn't feel right") can seem more like sentimental, narrative-serving fare -- not that that's necessarily a bad thing, considering their purposes. In the end, while Aurora plays out more like a cast album than unearthed period vinyl, it does hover on the spectrum, and the actor/musicians come to play while songs suggest the intended period Los Angeles music scene, if they rarely stand strong enough on their own to create their own legend.
© Marcy Donelson /TiVo