Chris English - Dreamtown

  by Malcolm Carter

published: 21 / 3 / 2009

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If music is a major part of your life and it obviously is or you wouldn’t be reading this, there are still probably times when you get a little jaded while waiting for the next big thing to come and blow you away. Music is like a best friend. It rarely lets you down but it can and does happen occasionally. Last night the eleven songs that had made it to the final of the Eurovision Song Contest in Sweden, where I live, battled it out on national TV. Whatever song won was to be the one that represented that country in the Eurovision Song Contest. It was a strange mixture of artists considering that this is the land that gave us Peter, Bjorn & John, A Camp and Anna Ternheim to name just a few. Much like England, artists like those mentioned above don’t get considered for the Eurovision. Not even Per Gessle got a look-in. Obviously Sweden doesn’t want a repeat of Abba’s 1974 victory. What we did see and hear were the expected Idol winners desperately trying to extend their 15 minutes of fame, the obligatory hard-rock outfit who were stuck in the mid-80s, a time when they weren’t even born, an astonishing amount of novelty acts and the winner, a female trying to mix pop and opera and failing miserably. It was enough to make you give up and wonder why music is so important to so many of us. So what has the Swedish entry for the Eurovision Song Contest (and probably any other country you could name too) got to do with ‘Dreamtown’, the debut album by Chris English ? Absolutely nothing. This is a good thing. What Chris English has done over the fourteen songs on ‘Dreamtown’ is reaffirm that some artists are still making real music with passion and soul and that artists of his calibre are the ones that should be on prime-time TV, not the jokers who are getting all the attention these days. I admit English was already half way to winning my vote just by the picture on the cover of 'Dreamtown'. Clutching a Rickenbacker and looking like he was of McGuinn’s generation, I was expecting an album of Byrds-like sounds. I was wrong. The short opening instrumental, ‘Sunrise’, does, in fact, conjure up images of its title. It’s possibly the best opening 40 seconds on any album I’ve heard all year. But it’s more Beach Boys than Byrds. Then it’s into the title song which is another surprise, shorn again of any Byrds influences it’s a soft rock masterpiece and not what I was expecting at all. It’s immediately obvious that English writes tunes that are strongly influenced by the sounds of the 60s and 70s and that he is an artist who has that rare talent of composing songs that not only register from the first play but that also stand up to repeated listening. English has opened shows for Hall and Oates which kind of makes sense as the song ‘Dreamtown’ brought back memories of Daryl Hall’s solo ‘Dreamtime’ song and, indeed, as 'Dreamtown' progresses, more elements of ‘Three Hearts In The Happy Ending Machine’, the album from which 'Dreamtime' comes, emerge. As his songs have such strong melodies and because they are filled with lush harmonies (try ‘Autumn’ for a prime example) which have an otherworldly feel and sound to them at times and due to that exceptionally strong 60s / 70s influence it’s all to easy to feel that you’ve heard these songs before. English is certainly not breaking any new ground here but what he has accomplished is to produce an album that is more than generous with warm, friendly sounds. If it’s English who is playing the guitar parts here (it’s difficult to read the details on our copy of the CD sleeve but as it states that the album was written, performed and produced by English I’ll take it that it’s him) then apart from writing extremely catchy songs and being the owner of an attractive, soft singing voice, he’s also an accomplished guitar player. It’s been said many times before and I am sure that English is tired of the comparisons but with those spot-on harmonies the sound of The Beach Boys hovers over this album and there is, at times, a remarkable resemblance to early Genesis that seeps through on some songs. A dreamy hour of some of the best pop/soft rock you will hear all year, superbly produced and faultlessly played makes ‘Dreamtown’ one of the most played albums so far this year.

Track Listing:-

1 Sunrise
2 Dreamtown
3 I Can See Everything
4 Autumn
5 Downtime
6 Without You
7 Into the Blue
8 I Can Take It
9 Summer Revisited
10 Sunshine Routine
11 The River
12 The Letter
13 God Is in the Silence
14 I Can See Everything (Radio Edit)

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