“I don’t need a dictionary to tell me / That what I’m sayin' don’t make sense” is not a great opening line. It’s a bit clumsy, and in a song called "Scrabble", the plodding imagery is much too obvious and contrived. Our singer, despite his wordy interests is “fucked up” (like a bad set of Scrabble tiles) and, guess what? Can you get the clue? “I love you”. (snarl) As if it was her fault, distracting him from getting the triple word score. This is just a bit pedestrian. And we still get lots of "Yeh Yeh Yeh"s to fill up the lines. Attention is not grabbed.
Clayton Elliott is an Australian resident of Cornwall who comes to us a writer, musician and activist. W&H listened sympathetically to his 2004 EP, but as time goes by, the case for his being a writer and musician is looking harder to sustain.
The songs themselves are very simple shuffles with semi-tunes and no particular hooks or points of interest, The lyrics are all as ponderous as the title track and the vocal style lacks the kind of consistency or authority that could sustain much more than a local audience of friends and associates. There are studio additions like the very English announcer voice reading out the Scrabble letters through a public address system and there is at least one pingy guitar solo that sounds glued on. Stereo separation is crude and the range of sounds on offer by-passes most of what has been learned over the years about low budget recording. I just wonder if Elliott has been listening to the current crop of lo-fi independents like Napoleon IIIrd, Patrick Wolf or the Fence Collective?
"Circled A (I Wanna Be Anarchy)" is a jolly kind of pastiche or parody (My irony receptors are unreliable at the best of times) that makes the fatal mistake of not sounding better than its UK punk sources. It has a horrid guitar solo that gets too close to sounding serious to be funny.
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"Pushed To My Limit" has a guest vocalist called Ryan and a New Orleans lilt that improves the listening experience by a mile. Even so, its central section uses another poor sound source (thin and wheedling) so it still suffers the lack of critical self-awareness the runs throughout the CD.
"Hayfever" psyches it up a bit with some soulful piano and meandering bass line, but "Everyone I Know" and "That's My Boy" revert to chugging along. "That's My Boy" even uses an unspirited version of "Green Onions" to deliver a run of the mill vocal line and some weak electric guitar playing. All in all, a rather lack-lustre set of songs with tentatively "alternative" accompaniments that lack conviction and don’t make any impression on this particular reviewer, despite multiple plays and an anxious look over the shoulder at our earlier review for inspiration. My sense is that these songs have not been out in front of live audiences as much as they should. What I'm hearing is the down side of solo home recording and distributing.
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