The sixth album from Hawaiian-born singer-songwriter Mason Jennings is a bit of a treat. In The Ever is varied and well-written, a patchwork of solid, well put together songs which together encompass humour, romance and tragedy.It opens with "Never Knew Your Name" and "Something About Your Love", which is possibly unwise as they're the two most straightforward and predictable songs on offer here. They're satisfying enough, but they're not a patch on the much stronger and braver tracks Jennings has for us later on the album - luckily we only have to wait until the third track to hear "I Love You And Buddha Too", a very funny song about Jennings' view that all world religions are facets of the same thing. "Oh Jesus I love you" Jennings sings, "and I love Buddha too / Rama Krishna Gurudev / Dao Dei Jing and Muhammad". All this is captured over a jaunty piano line and ever-building percussion.Even more overtly comedic is "Your New Man", a breaking-up-and-getting-back-together song sung in an amusingly OTT countrified way. With live crowd noise acting as a sort of laughter track for the gags in the lyrics, the song is very hard not to enjoy - "he probably fixes things around your place when they break / If he says he likes your cooking he's a fake". The musical accompaniment is just acoustic guitar, meaning that the triumvirate of the crowd, Jennings, and his guitar make the song very intimate-sounding.At the other end of the spectrum is "My Perfect Lover". Long and slow, the song is a contemplative song about love and loss. Somehow Jennings makes the simplest rhymes deeply satisfying in this context, his voice joined only by guitar, subtly brushed drums and the occasional piano note. The unrelenting slowness of the pace manages to deepen the tragic tone rather than simply being boring, which is a very difficult line to walk indeed. The tone contrasts hugely with some of the earlier songs on the album, so this one is wisely placed towards the end. Happily though, Jennings doesn't place another slow track at the album's end as so many artists do - instead we have the very lively "Sassafrass" which again uses rhyme and homophony as its main tools. There are some classic lines here too - "Ashes to ashes and dust to dust / If you don't use my love it'll turn to rust."Whilst far from perfect, In The Ever is full of such interesting songs - elsewhere there's "Soldier Boy" (mercifully not a cover of "Crank That (Soulja Boy)"... although in retrospect, that would be an interesting proposition) with its great wordless chorus, and the dense "Going Back To New Orleans" which uses a unique multiple harmonica effect to create a fuzzy wall of sound against which the rest of the song is pitched. No two songs sound alike, and each works both in isolation as part of the greater whole. A charming and soundly constructed set of songs, In The Ever is definitely well worth a look. 79%Mason Jennings on MySpace