pReview

I think my music has changed quite a bit since I first started writing songs, aged eight. Stylistically, I have moved from pop to pop-rock to electro-pop to folk-pop to pop-punk to rock to prog-rock to weird-folk. Instrumentally, I have moved from keyboard to electric guitar to acoustic guitar to bass to synthesiser to assorted. Thematically, I have moved from hamsters to simplistic right-wing politics to nature to Taoism to simplistic left-wing politics to sex with misogynist undertones to sex with feminist overtones to... well, it's difficult to say what one's songs are about while one is writing them. Slightly-more-pressing-but-perhaps-still-simplistic left-wing politics, maybe.

Anyway. What I wanted to say was that what has stayed constant is the way I imagine songs (and groups of songs) before/during the writing process. I imagine somebody reviewing my tracks, always positively, and imagine the sort of things they might say. Then I try to create the track I have just reviewed.

So, this is my current working review for my new album:

The artwork for Matt Bradshaw's latest offering, "Salt of the Sky", depicts a mustard-yellow sky, seemingly teetering between disease and defiance. A spectral cityscape is impossibly reflected there, as though in a lake, upside down and ominous, though the setting (or rising?) sun shines up in hope. It is clearly not an image that has been chosen by accident, as the music treads this same line: hope and despair, anger and acceptance, creation and decay.

The building blocks of the tracks are artificial; drums machines, synthesisers, effect-laden guitar. But this is merely the bread. The meat, the shining soul of the music, is the quiet acoustic balladry that permeates the noise. "Salt of the Sky" is the sound of a folksinger coming to terms with his anachronistic nature and making peace with it; it is the sound of a sad-eyed observer floating through cities and wondering just how much of the ugly vista below is inexorable.

That's vague, I know. And perhaps it is egotistical, but surely modesty is something you should conjur after you've created something? Right now, this is my target. No point aiming for the Demo Dumper (cliquey Oxford reference!).

Right. Bed. x