If his solo output is anything to go by, Martin Carr must have been bouncing off the walls in The Boo Radleys. A cluster of E.P.s and mini-albums have been awash with the strings and horns, electronics and drum loops, glockenspiels, zithers and harmoniums of an indie hero reveling in his creative freedom. Advertisements for Myself, from the off, is going to be no exception – track one drifts in on a sample and a lonely clarinet, track two is a fifty-second electronic interlude, and track three rides a bass overdub so distorted it nigh-on obliterates the rest of the mix.
So Carr likes to play about. The important question, especially given critical misgivings over the work of higher-profile indie refugees like Ian Brown and Damon Albarn, is whether his arrangements are the tools of a genuinely gifted songwriter or a strategy for tarting up indifferent material. Well, the jury’s still out. Although his exploration of techno and electronica on AFM isn’t always
I Was A Teenage Death Squad, as the title suggests, does a passable Luke Haines (albeit minus the trademark venom), Fucking Sunday has some of The Charlatans' funky swagger (albeit minus the trademark Hammond), and Mobilise sweeps and swoons like a Christmas hit (albeit minus the trademark references to Christmas). The biggest problem is that Carr’s vocals rarely depart from the nasal singalong of Northern anorak rock, coping fine with the monotone sneer of Down Between but stretching to a reedy yelp when Dive, an insistent chunk of cheap techno, really needs a Keith Flint growl.
The nineteen tracks maintain a respectable hit rate, but a handful of electronic asides feel like an indulgence, serving only to disrupt AFM’s flow and focus. Do we really need one between the solid, glammy My Mind Pictures and the sweetly humorous Release ("every woman is a Queen – except the Queen, who’s just a woman")? Lo-fi auteurs commonly populate their albums with a degree of studio run-off – Badly Drawn Boy operates on a similar ethic, and his debut suffered from the same problem – but the fact that these fragments are impersonal beeps and boings rather than snatches of humour or emotional vignettes means their inclusion is of dubious value.
There’s plenty of quality here, particularly the pained squelch-bass hybrid Rod’s Got One, but ultimately AFM spreads Carr’s intermittent genius too thin; his two Fingertip Saint Sessions may have been less adventurous, but at six and nine tracks each they had a coherence and economy that hit far harder. He has at least one (more) classic in him, but this isn’t quite it.
Nathan Midgley
nathanmidgley@hotmail.com
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