sometimes an album that you've been looking forward to can be a big disappointment, other times an album that you least expect to be good can be a surprise. Thankfully this one, highly anticipated by this reviewer lived up to expectations and then some. This album deserves to be heard, but in today's fickle x factor music world, sadly it won't be, this angers me greatly, such great music but too smaller audience.
i loved Cradock's first solo album 'the kundalini Target', that had a pastoral feel about it, a garden listen. This album is so lushly produced, its like Cradock has taken all his influences and put them in a musical food blender, it's such a gorgeous sounding piece of work. To me the surprise is Cradock's voice, he need's to give Fowler a dig in the chest occasionally. I love the interlude pieces too, interlude 2 sounding like a Harrison out-take and interlude 3 like some Brubeck. I can hear so much in this, and I hate doing that, saying this sounds like this, like that but it is inevitable but whatever Cradock was listening to when he recorded this, he has bettered it, taken it as his own unique influence.
i'd like to think that Cradock had these songs in his canon and decided 'i'm keeping these for my solo album', seriously Ocean Colour Scene could never have done them justice. Without the constrains of his collaborator's Cradock's musical talents are allowed to flow and ebb through his own musical landscape. There really isn't a bad song on this album, and that's saying something, really. I even wish they hadn't put the 'featuring' sticker on the album cover, but i guess the record company didn't think Cradock alone was a big enough pull to shift units.
i was going to do a track by track review, but highlights would be the opening track 'last day of the old world', a kind of an anthem to a pre-digital age and 'i-man' a similar ode to the 'i' world we inhabit. Notable is the fact that the longest track is just over four and a half minutes long and Cradock pack's so much music into those minutes, so many good sounds. Its great to have an album that paints a musical painting of such depth that with every listen you hear something different or should i say in every place. I've listened to it in my car when i first got it, then on speakers loud at work and now through my i-phones, everytime different.
Matt Berry's album was my album of the year thus far, then this dropped through my letter box and it's only April! It's truly going to be a vintage year for music of modernist influence.
I hope to have an interview with Steve later on this month, and if we're lucky his mixtape!
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