Nik Barrell - Growing Peaches in Oxfordshire

by Kimberly Bright

published: 30 / 8 / 2017

Nik Barrell - Growing Peaches in Oxfordshire

Label: Nik Barrell
Format: CD

Determinedly cheerful new album from Brighton-based singer-songwriter and musician Nik Barrell which we didn’t even know we needed

Review

Coming up with an entire album of upbeat songs, no matter what happens to be going on in one’s life at the time, sounds like a daunting task. But for Brighton’s singer-songwriter Nik Barrell this project became a pro-happiness manifesto. Fed up with the cynicism he heard in pop, indie and hip hop music and witnessed in the culture producing it, no doubt including snarky music critics in no small measure, Nik decided to deliberately create music that provides the positivity and happy glow one feels when one first falls in love with music at a young age. Many of these songs were written during and after extensive travelling and working in Asia and America – not just the coastal cities, either. These songs are folky Americana, with some tiptoeing the line between nostalgia and novelty, delivered with boyish charm. He is joined by back-up singers Sharon Lewis, Anjuli Hararah, and Vanessa Thomas, Mark Strains on double bass, Alan Grice on piano, Tim Cotterell on violin, and James Fiddes Smith on mandolin and backing vocals. As you can see from this list, there are no drums. There’s no amplification either. The old-timey sounding arrangements might strike some as hokey at first, with ragtime piano, Vaudeville-era guitar vamping, and country-tinged violin, but it honestly all works. By the album’s end, an improvement in the listener’s mood is inevitable. Nik’s innocent, naïve lyrics are similar in style to Jonathan Richman’s, with the same kind of unapologetic sentimentality and humour rarely seen outside of country music. If Jonathan Richman and Leon Redbone ever collaborated on a record, it might approximate this sound, but then there would be no references to Oxfordshire. “I know happy days are sure to come,” he sings on the title track, inviting everyone to visit him in that county and take some peaches home. Even a song with a message of anti-materialism like 'A Heart of Money is a Heart of Stone' comes off as sweet and not even remotely preachy. Nik has a beautiful, rich voice that seems designed to croon standard Tin Pan Alley love songs, perfect for vulnerable, unguarded songs like the fantastic 'Her and I', 'Things We Do Not Know', and the open-hearted 'Love Is' (“The more I give away, the more keeps coming my way”). His love song to New Orleans, “always doing its own damn thing,” triumphant in so many ways but still struggling so long after Hurricane Katrina, makes you want to move there immediately. Contrasting the lack of friendliness in other cities like New York, Baltimore, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago and Austin, and the diverse music scene (“big beat, punk, funk, rock and roll, and jazz”), he adds this advice for musicians: “There’s a lot of talent way up in Nashville, waiting around to be seen/ But if they ask me, I say 'Fuck the industry, baby, get yourself down to New Orleans.'” The album closes with the sunny 'People are Good', his insistent belief, acquired after all his years of travelling throughout the world, in the inherent goodness of humans everywhere. “Any place to care to land, you’re going to find a helping hand… Watch the news, you get the idea that there are no good people here, but people are good.” If it’s possible to bottle sunshine, and even the album art has rays of it shining everywhere, Nik Barrell and his Oxfordshire peaches have done just that.

Track Listing:-

1 A Heart of Money Is a Heart of Stone
2 It's Your Choice
3 Her and I
4 Growing Peaches in Oxfordshire
5 Thank You
6 Love Is
7 New Orleans
8 Things We Do Not Know
9 Blues Come Home to You
10 People Are Good