Songs for Mr Sloane - Strange Days

  by Andrew Carver

published: 10 / 9 / 2011

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Review

Songs For Mr. Sloane is the duo Peter Dale, who handles the singing, guitar-playing and keyboards, and Guy Snook, who plays the bass. They’ve concocted a 12-song album that dips into a spectrum of pop music ranging from the classic era of radio to Britpop. On ‘Silence’, an anti-technology plea to trash everything from TV to airplanes, they blend acoustic and bursts of electric guitar to an effect similar to that of New Zealand’s Mutton Birds. The drums are occasionally a bit busy but the guitar fuzz and plangent piano make for a pleasant and lyrically relevant contrast. On 'I Can’t Let You Go’, Dale’s vocals chart out the same territory as Doves’ Jimi Goodwin. The musical backing is always poppy but fairly diverse: While the title track plays out over an electropop backing, ‘Paris in the Rain’ is cast as an acoustic ballad, an anglicized version of Jacques Brel’s chansons, though the tinkling piano and Spanish guitar does bring it dangerously close to self-parody. Indeed, the band seems to draw a great deal on the feel of 1970s singer-songwriters, given a home-studio twist, with ‘It’s Only Love’ directly in the tradition of the radio-friendly and ‘Underground’ managing a stately croon. ‘You’re Right’ dishes the electric guitars up again, as well as the potted strings that show up over a good chunk of the album for a bit of cod-Queen, while ‘The Last Great Silent Romeo’ goes back to the sound of ‘Paris in the Rain’, with a bit of Randy Newman during the jaunty bits. ‘I Will Never Touch You Again’ emerges from Alan Parsons Project territory in their ‘Don’t Answer Me’ vein. The album’s returns do show some shrinkage as it comes to a close: ‘Own Way Home’ returns to the piano for another slight dose of shmaltz during the intro, while ‘(Another Song Called) Hollywood sacrifices a promising, electrically charged intro for a rather trite starstruck narrative. ‘The Girl Who Invented Goodbye’ starts with a buzzing, horn-laden intro before turning smoother and jazzier, crossbreeding a James Bond theme song with the earlier work of The Divine Comedy (with some theremin-like sounds thrown into the instrumental break for good measure). Taken as a whole, ‘Strange Days’ is a pleasant listen that shows signs of great, if occasionally inconsistent craftsmanship.

Track Listing:-

1 Silence
2 Explicit.
3 Strange Days
4 Paris in the Rain
5 It's Only Love
6 Underground
7 You're Right
8 The Last Great Silent Romeo
9 I Will Never Touch You Again
10 Own Way Home
11 Hollywood
12 The Girl Who Invented Goodbye