Homage is a producer from Cincinnati and one of the founders of Fort Ancient Records. Aside from staying busy with the label’s Fort Ancient Airlines series of releases, Homage released a solo album one year ago called Hacienda. Now he comes back with another solo album, Unfortunately.

The idea behind Unfortunately is that this is an album that is about disappointment or failure, or just all the shitty things that life can hand you. In practice, it almost feels like this is an album to listen to when something goes wrong to help calm you down and even things out. That’s because this album isn’t especially sad, and it doesn’t sound all doom and gloom. In fact, it actually sounds quite peaceful and beautiful. For the overall sound of the album, Homage is drawing upon some ‘60s jazz/lounge sample sources that have a real easy-going feel to them. It’s a real meditative album with gorgeous grooves to it, the kind that you can press play on, put on your headphones, and just tune out the world for a minute. The only real problem with the album comes in Homage’s use of vocal clips at the ends and beginnings of tracks. There’s not one singular bad clip on the album, and they never go on too long or anything like that, but there are a lot of them. The first problem with this is that when you have that many vocal clips is that it just ruins the momentum over the course of the album and makes the listening experience much more stop and start. The other problem is that the clips are not all that clearly themed together. They might be interesting on their own, but when they are popping up as often as they are on this album and it’s not clear who’s speaking or what it has to do with the last clip, it becomes even more distracting from the music.

One problem aside, Homage is a talented instrumental producer, and Unfortunately has a lot of beautiful downtempo music on it. It doesn’t quite come together as well as it should have, but it’s still pretty enjoyable.