Ostle Bay - Love From Ostle Bay

  by John Clarkson

published: 6 / 4 / 2003

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'Love from Ostle Bay' is, for all the clever word play of its title, also exactly what it says it is : a collection of love songs. The new project of Glaswegian Peter Rose, the former singer with Weimar Republic-inspired cabaret pop act Johnson, it focuses on the bleak side of romance, and tells of when things don't work out and the guy doesn't get the girl. Rose is accompanied by John and Stephen Douglas, Paul Livingston and Grant Wilson, four out of five of the Trashcan Sinatras (Only singer Frank Read is missing), whose shimmering acoustic guitars, petaling trumpets and dizzying harmonicas help to give his thickset, brooding vocals and songs a luxurious, treacle-coated edge. "Hey sugar, you may be called Tuesday/Hey, sugar, you're Friday night to me" Rose sings on the album's brightest moment, the breezy 'Tuesday', but there is a sense of loss and the unattainable even in this as well, as he has already told us three tracks earlier on the claustrophic, terse 'Wish I Was With You' that he spends Friday evenings on his own. ("Friday night there's nothing to Do/Wish I Was With You") Ultimately it seems that Rose is destined to be alone. 'Ostle Bay' , with gently plucked acoustics and eerie sound effects, tells evocatively of an idyllic day spent on a beach, but any romance is clearly long over and now simply confined to memory ("How we stared/How we swam/How we spun and how we ran/How we chased and we played/Beneath the sky which blew the clouds away"). The tortured 'The One' is, more disturbing and is written from the desperate perspective of a voyeur. "Can I not be the robe lifting from your bath ? " muses Rose with a genuine sense of creepiness This is life seen through the microscope, played out in miniscule detail, with each moment another snapshot. Rose on the evidence of this perhaps needs to get out more. There are times when his self-absorption and cloying neediness become too much. 'Love from Ostle Bay' is, however, so well executed and impeccably played and performed that there are moments too when one is very glad as well that he has chosen to stay in. Early reviews have drawn the band references with Tindersticks and Scott Walker. They are fair comparisions. The West of Scotland, in the shape of Aztec Camera, Edwyn Collins, the Bathers and the Blue Nile, has, however, always done this type of atmospheric, mood rock well. While sometimes over self-indulgent, Ostle Bay are a definite worthy potential successor to their thrones.

Track Listing:-

1 Ostle Bay
2 Dusting The Sun
3 The One
4 Music Box
5 Did I Ever Say
6 Wish I Was With You
7 Wont You
8 Windows On The Pavement
9 Tuesday
10 Farming For Diamonds
11 Out Of Those Eyes

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