Soundsxp Album Review

"If, as they say, misery loves company, it deserves your full attention in this case. Kelman’s second album has all the glass-half-empty mournfulness of Tindersticks mixed with the romantic hopefulness of Grant McLennan. It’s a powerful formula when combined with Velvet Underground-styled crepuscular organ drones, a driving beat and ringing guitars (it’s very easy to imagine John Cale intoning the prose story of ‘The Pursued, The Pursuing, The Busy and The Tired’). These are curiously compelling tales of urban life, in all its pained, bruised and broken beauty. Even though there’s a suggestion of finality and disaster in many of Wayne Gooderham’s melancholic titles (though fewer than on the powerfully doomy debut Loneliness Has Kept Us Alive) songs like ‘Shut A Final Door’ and the krautrocking ‘NYE’ develop into something powerfully exciting. They may have named themselves after a Scottish author but the one that comes to mind is Samuel Beckett; their lyrics seem to exemplify his line: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”. But that describes the mood only: the music is a brilliant success, the sound of a cult in the making. Don’t miss out when the dark side is calling."
Ged M, Soundsxp