BUG PRENTICE – THE WAY IT CRUMBLES (Self-released)
“I wish that we could live in a library”, dream Bug
Prentice on the woozy, melancholic “Spoons”, summing up an album that likes to
sneak up on life from the far side, from a point of thoughtful academia or
fanboy geekery. Over 38 minutes, we pick
up lyrical references to a drunk Orson Welles, Nicholas Ray’s films, Cole
Porter and Kurt Vonnegut. “Angular
Spirals” doesn’t seem to be riffing on anything specific, but sounds more like
a Vorticist lonely hearts column than your average pop song: the narrators of
these songs seem more comfortable away from the action, immersed in scholarly footnotes,
DVD extras and bottomless YouTube rabbit holes.
So it’s astonishing how emotionally direct this record
is. Ally Craig might be delivering lyrics
consisting of compact, absurd vignettes (“Ceilidh Dancer”) or just dicking
about (hipster grunge parody “Moustache”), but his gorgeous, dry, delicate
voice, like the smoked out ghost of Jeff Buckley, makes it seem like he’s whispering
soul-drenched secrets. The music also
gives the songs visceral immediacy: the guitar plays elastic mandelbrot blues
that’s somewhere between John Renbourne, Thurston Moore and James Blood Ulmer,
whilst the rhythm section hide subtly in the background for long periods,
before erupting into hefty Slint-shaped blasts.
If one song sums the record up, it’s “Nebraska Admiral”, a beautiful brooding
lament that teeters on the edge of atonality but which has the cornballiest,
music-halliest opening couplet you’ll hear all year, sounding like mid-90s
Kristin Hersh with lyrics by Ian Dury. If
you’ve seen Ally live, you’ll know he can wrench the sentimental core from an
Ivor Cutler piece and reveal the unsuspected profundity in a song from The Muppets, so this mixture of cabaret
schmaltz and surreal sincerity should come as no surprise. This is one of the best Oxford albums in
recent times, but be prepared to put some work in, The Way It Crumbles is one tough cookie.
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