Have ass, will travel. Failing that catch a passing camel.
My Camel launches a 12-track album conceived on the road, a quirky travelogue of sorts with plenty of hellos and goodbyes to and from Brighton, Berlin, Balluta Bay and Wakefield.
Brinks, a Parisian by birth and wanderer by nature, was formerly know as André Herman Düne. This is his fourth album with the English three-piece band The Wave Pictures.
His is a world where the exotic rubs shoulders with the mundane and plaintive love songs double up as modern day music hall style tunes.
The songs are like jokes made in deadly earnest. They ooze melancholy yet are also replete with a resigned bemusement towards life's transient pleasures. "I'm like an electron, you could say I hardly exist" he muses with no great sadness on Fire To My Mind.
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A saucy clarinet and penny whistle conjure up a mood of cut-price exotica, eccentric guitar solos are throwbacks to psychedelic garage bands.
Meanwhile a studio choir of friends adds an air of jaunty camaraderie. The message seems to be that while you may have sorrows, they are nothing a few mates plus some smokes, beers and chips can't cure
"I'm still an outsider", Brinks reflects on Back To My Island In The Sun and you get the distinct impression he wouldn't want it any other way.
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