Songs anyone would, or should, want on their stereo, with old blocks and chips full to the fore.
ANYTHING BUT…
Given most reviews of this confident debut play on actually whose “family stereo” this singer-songwriter learnt his trade, let’s try something different. As in, FFS, give the boy a chance, as any listen will so swiftly confirm the lack of any need to, for anything other than interest. First drawn to ATB attention by an earlier single from the album, and which we were appropriately impressed by, quickly off the blocks is the realisation that it was no fluke, and wasn’t/isn’t even the best of the selection now offered. For Blake Watt, no googling, has a gift for both tunes and wordplay that is both a complement and a contrast to any parent he might have, as they watch anxiously from the wings.
RICH BROTH
The ambiance here is broadly melancholic and racked, never a bad thing in the Og ear, with instrumentation chosen to measure and reflect the same. So we get stripped back synths and steel. with occasional tinkling interludes from banjos and mandolins, with any sense of it being too overtly folkie or country yee-haw dispelled by washes of mellotron and more. In fact, rarely do either of these genres come to mind. The production condenses all these disparate aspects into a rich broth that is both all and none of the individual constituents. And then there is his voice.
SKELETAL BEAUTY
There is a gaunt skeletal beauty about opener, The Remedy, initially just sparse piano chords and naked vocals, before shimmers of fauxchestration attach a hazy screenscape. It is entirely compelling and you can feel your vitals begin to snap under the strain. Waiting on Nina then sparks up my favourite game, that of wondering quite who and what was on the applicable family stereo. Clearly the steel guitar style of one David Gilmour will have been been on the playlist, the song a languid dawdle through sun dappled city streets, set to a simple drum pattern that frames perfectly his swoony choirboy. Timeless and ageless, any number of distant ghosts float and flicker through the grooves, evoking a weird sense of Twickenham Tropicalia.
A hint of Richard Hawley inhabits the construction of Sea Change, with what could be theremin, but likely isn’t, acting as a makeshift chorus. By the same token, should you be party to the elsewhere common knowledge, the ineffable debut of his parent(s), a jazzy sensibility permeating also the fumes. Maybe it is the simply strumming guitar. But it is a forward reaching motorik drumbeat that then drives Fault Lines, showing his apple has as many varieties as the tree has branches. The keys apply the same feel of haste as the percussion and it is a driving fever dream of textures. But what are these songs about, realising that I have been too overpowered by the melodies to take note. Attention reveals it a song of sombre dawning, appreciating reality isn’t necessarily quite as warm and reassuring as first thought. Nor ever is it. Who needs happy?
SCALING HEIGHTS
The title track doesn’t have quite the same power of the songs ahead it, but does give a pause to reflect on what has come before, a piano based ballad that, against expectation, shears off into a collage of additional sounds, a tapestry probably, given the title. A picked guitar is then the scaffold around which the yearning Removed is built, where the weave of sounds is more successful, adding spiky shine to an otherwise similarly conventional template: “I’m not sure, now, if I have the capacity to choose the things that I deserve“. Actually, Blake, on consideration, I suspect you probably do. Sam Hodder-Williams adds a neatly concise guitar solo, as well as heavy lifting across the synths and “string” arrangements. Suddenly the album is scaling those heights again.
A title like Collapsing could apply to many things, but it takes little to guess it is more to whom, and this has some warm banjo bubbling about the fringes, with harmonies from Ella Bleakley a lush additional. A song in cinemascope, or possibly even IMAX, it has a perfectly balanced bigness about it that impresses. I’ll put that down, in part, to Hodder-Williams, who also produces.
A false end ushers in some snatched speech and a coda that isn’t strictly necessary, but, hey. But, hold that thought, it is actually exactly the right buffer zone between that track and the aforementioned single, DLR. a song far more direct than many here. Oddly, it makes better sense here than as a stand alone, despite the almost shocking instancy of it, buoyed on a driving piano motif. And it’s nice to think the boy Watt being more upbeat, even if the words, to some extent, belie that.
DANSETTE IN THE KITCHEN
It’s sombre town again, for Silhouette On The Hill, which might lag a little, before the percussion and pedal steel give the song some guts. Did I mention that the drums are tremendous throughout. My copy didn’t reveal from whom, but myself suspicion is that they might come from Watt himself, his bio suggesting they his first instrument, ahead guitar and piano. As the song reaches a climax, echoes of well-hidden early R.E. M appear, So. Central Rain in particular, suggesting that band also were staples on the dansette in the kitchen.
Anyone with a penchant for steel guitar will then become instantly enamoured of Three Moon Trail, which, as a song, minds me of Nick Drake, if then sending me into a reverie of imagining Tanworth-In-Arden’s finest with, say, B.J. Cole, he perhaps the only UK provider thereof, of that era. Add the lashings in of mellotronics and it’s lush.
Only room now for the final song, Tunnels, which bookends the set neatly with a near naked piano ballad, Watt’s pure and sweet high tenor (low alto?) floating over the accompaniment, which then springs into rhythm with drums, banjo and electric guitar. Wistful and ethereal, it shows , to a T, possibly two, quite what gifts this singer has inherited. Still wanting to know who from? Well, I could suggest he fulfils the title of Mr and Mrs Watt’s band. You can go google now.
Try Fault Lines for size:
Family Stereo: Website