Sensitive, crafted pop songs from Love & Other Hopeless Things the latest album by The Pearlfishers, the way that Roddy Frame and Paddy McAloon used to write them. It's a beautiful warm spring day in Newcastle, the best conditions in which to listen to this altogether lovely record.
The young Frame's fingerprints in particular are all over these songs but I for one am not complaining. David Scott, the singer and songwriter who fronts The Pearlfishers, (and has done for over twenty years), knows perfectly well that this stuff never ever goes out of fashion, any more than love and romance do. That a song penned by Bacharach and David will always mean much, much more than one penned by Gallagher and we all need to remember always just how we felt when we were seventeen.
Somehow this stuff always sounds best coming from a Scot and here we have one actually called Scott. The songs variously project memories, sunshine, dreams and relentless and admirable positivity. The accompanying soundtrack is all Eighties understated Indie and backing 'ba ba bas,' as they couldn't afford the Motown orchestra, as if that matters a jot
'Magic that springs from the gutter, beauty that rings...' a line from One for the Bairns which could act as a manifesto for this whole glorious exercise, Scott is the friend you always wish you had, the one who unfailingly pulls you out of your deepest darkest moods. He understands only too well how the deepest beauty resides in the smallest things. Love & Other Hopeless Things is the best 'nephew of Roddy and Edwyn album' you'll hear this year.
No comments:
Post a Comment