After having spent time in the World/Inferno Friendship Society and The Hold Steady among others, multi-instrumentalist Franz Nicolay is going at it solo again with “Do The Struggle”. The album comes with folky songs that sound like a crossover between Billy Bragg and Luka Bloom. The guy knows his way around melodies and good lyrics, but all too often the song just doesn’t stick.

Is it because of the production job, which comes courtesy of Dälek’s Oktopus? For some reason they felt the need to use interludes between every song that serve absolutely no purpose. And even the songs themselves suffer from having too many sounds heaped on top of them. Take the title track for example with an annoying guitar line that keeps popping up throughout the song along alongside way more percussion than there should be.

The result is an album that has a lot of good ideas on it but that falls flat in the end.