Three Mike Marlin singles have already been reviewed on Whisperin' & Hollerin' so a write-up of the eleven tunes on his debut album is slightly overdue. Then again, what's a couple of months when most of these songs have taken the best part of three decades to see the light of day?
Marlin is a university dropout turned computer geek whose musical dreams were all but drowned in alcohol around 1982. From this point zero he was rescued by a career in technology and by meeting producer James Durrant who liked the songs he'd continued to work on in his basement flat.
Marlin has had years to study the competition and rework this material if he wanted to but he has decided that he's happy to stick with the 70s-80s sound he grew up with. Elvis Costello and Paul Weller are cited as heroes but his baritone voice is also a dead ringer for Scary Monsters era David Bowie. His able but unspectacular backing band The Whethermen are happy to play along with this choice
He has wisely omitted the novelty cover of The Bee Gees' Staying Alive to focus entirely on his own songs. In these, the target of his sardonic wit is mostly himself as he muses on the barbs of outrageous fortune which now have a happier outcome than he could have anticipated.
"I am guilty of crimes against the state of me", he confesses on Guilty and he tells us the minutiae of his lonely days including mundane tasks like flossing teeth and sorting out the sock drawer.
In The Basement ("counting out time") and Undercover Genius also document these lost years which were occasionally brightened by feeling "elated by who I wanted to be".
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The pent up frustration finds expression in the strident opener (Hit The Button) with rasping electric guitar and venomous lyrics while Play That Game is a word to the wise about the rules of life you don't get to hear about until it's almost too late ("don't try to be honest or politically correct").
The maudlin No Place Like Home ("am I just the same as all the rest") is a bit of a damp squid by the side of these.
A bitter sweet love song Not Perfect and a song about his father (Second Son) touch on sensitive issues and in these songs he sounds more vulnerable than bullish.
The spoken word title track which closes the album is a self-deprecating confession of a younger man with lots of plans that came to nought.
Any one of these songs might be depressing tales of delusion if he hadn't turned a corner and got himself nominated as one HMV's next big things and landed a prestigious support slot with the Stranglers.
A burly bearded guy with tinted glasses makes an unlikely pop star but the ingredients for his fifteen minutes of fame are in place.
Who knows, he might just become the catalyst for other middle-aged males to kick out their slippers and dust off their guitars.
Mike Marlin's Homepage
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