It’s the new year, and it’s time to explore fresh
vistas. New broom, sweeps clean, and all
that. Actually, all brooms sweep clean,
otherwise they’re just sticks; if your old broom didn’t sweep clean, then clearly
you left it too long to get a new broom.
Anyway, forget brooms. Why did
you bring up brooms, this is a music column.
So, we suggest that you go out and discover a new act or two, so you can
talk about them in later years when they’re ginormous, with a smug
condescending tone.
One band you could start with is Balloon Ascents. I stumbled across this Oxford quintet
recently, and were astonished by the relaxed confidence on stage – so much so
that my muzzy old brain harked back to memories of shows by glam urchins Sexy
Breakfast. And, although there’s a taut sense
of cabaret about Balloon Ascents, they also have a light, folky subtlety in
their sound – refreshing for such a young band - which has perhaps been
influenced by Stornoway. Like all great pop music, they sound utterly
timeless and astonishingly contemporary, and if they’re perhaps yet6 to write a
killer song, the construction of their current set is evidence of great
compositional skill, that is just one giant hook away from wrenching the hearts
away from a generation of listeners.
There’s not much online yet, just a couple of live
acoustic videos. These are fine, but
don’t capture the graceful weight of the full band...still, that’s all the more
reason to seek them out in some cosy venue near you, isn’t it?
PAUL BRENNAN – JUST A DAY (Own Label)
Slowly, Paul Brennan has been nudging his way into our
consciousness as a singer-songwriter who doesn’t wallow in a drab morass of
self-pity, and as a purveyor of simple, old-fashioned tuneful songs, who doesn’t turn this
conservatism inwards in an endless spiral of dead rock traditionalism and
tedious hardware worship. It’s a bit odd
that Brennan, a man who pens hummable melodies with straightforwardly emotional
lyrics with solid, unfrilly arrangements should be such a rarity. Perhaps just singing a song, like telling a
joke, is much harder than it looks.
“Just A Day”, it has to be said, wavers on the edge of
being a joke, taking a potshot at the hollow consumerist centre of
Christmas. This, of course, is nearly as
much of a cliché as spraying fake snow in shop windows and Christmas Eve vomit
in the gutters, but it doesn’t stop it being a valid point. What we like most about the song is not the
easy ¾ strumming, nor the damnedly catchy Ringo-simple vocal line but the
undercurrent of hope that saves the song from being an empty tirade. In the video, a drunken, angry Santa stumbles
through the streets of Witney before collapsing in tears at a graveside, and
it’s easy to see Brennan as the sad, sozzled conscience of Britain, perhaps
taking the mantle that Paul Heaton seems to have let slip.
Brennan’s last single was “Dance Like Morrissey”, a
jaunty indie cross between The Wonderstuff and The Saw Doctors – the video to
which saw him once again get twatted on spirits, incidentally – and some adept
Googling found a discussion of the song on a Morrissey message board, where one
listener had observed “you sound like Michael Stipe if he’d just been kicked in
the mouth”. Not quite sure how they came
to this conclusion, but one of Brennan’s strengths is that he doesn’t revel in
the obfuscatory mystery of R.E.M.’s best lyrics and vocals, preferring to shoot
straight for the heart – although perhaps when “Just A Day” breaks down to a
sleighbell rhythm with the line “just hope you’re not alone” it’s a festive
homage to “Everybody Hurts” (or, at least, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide”). This might not be the most sophisticated
record of the year, but if you relish the idea of singing along to a great
melody, and surreptitiously wiping a tear away as you hoist your 11th
gin of the evening, Paul Brennan will be a name to watch out for in 2014.
