Two Shots
The big-label bow of this Toronto-born, classically trained pretender to the contemporary crooner crown comes bundled in a shrewdly frank marketing gambit. Dusk scored a recurring role on the reality seriesCasinoas a young, wannabe showroom headliner. As with virtually every ambitious retro-pop male vocalist since Harry Connick, Jr.,  the musical touchstone here is Sinatra, from the album's title track (an 80th-birthday gift from U2 to the Chairman himself, who never recorded it) to a rhythmically sprightly take on "Fly Me To the Moon." But what noses the 24-year-old Dusk ahead of his rat-packaged competitors here is a promising understanding of the canon that goes deeper than mere ring-a-ding-ding trappings. While his bold, downbeat recasting of the Beatles' "Please Please Me" falls short of its ambitions, songs like "Lonely Road," "Every Mother's Son," "Always" and "Five" (the latter two tellingly co-written by the singer himself) have a reflective, autumnal tone that gratifyingly echo Sinatra's own period of willful, introspective reinvention in the mid-1950s.--Jerry McCulley