A Day In A Manger

I'm trying, and failing, to think of good science/music puns.  Here's Jan's Ocelot piece.  Not sure how much longer I'll write these Ocelot articles.

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 11^th gin of the evening, Paul Brennan will be a name to watch out for in 2014.