OR   Search for Artist/Title    Advanced Search
 
you are not logged in...  [login] 
All Reviews    Edit This Review     
Review: 'Goodwin, Paul'
'The Northern Lights in the Neon Tube'   

-  Album: 'The Northern Lights in the Neon Tube'
-  Genre: 'Folk' -  Release Date: '16th September 2016'

Our Rating:
It was this very site which hailed Paul Goodwin’s 2011 mini-album ‘Trinkets and Offcuts’ (the follow-up to ‘Scars’ (2009)) as ‘one of the year’s most under-rated releases’. Aside from a 5-track EP in 2012, Pal’s been keeping a low profile since then. Not that he hasn’t been keeping busy, with significant life changes, - including the birth of his now two-year-old son, slowing the productivity rate of an artists who, by his own admission is not a fast worker: ‘I’m incredibly slow at doing things anyway’, he says. ‘It took me a month to get the gaps between the songs right’.

The influences on his latest offering, ‘The Northern Lights In The Neon Tube’ are primarily of a pop punk persuasion: he loves The Smith Street Band alongside his early love of The Frames and other folk and country artists such as Dar Williams and Steve Earle.

It’s a mellow country folk sound that defines the album’s low-key opener ‘Cold Case’. The shuffling drums are low in the mix, and Goodwin’s vocals, unpretentious, honest and disarming in their absolute humanity.

‘Wasted on the Young’ dissects the dichotomy of growing into adult life and responsibilities, and is anything but slushy or sanctimonious, and as is also the case with the far heavier ‘Guilt-Edged Opportunity’, Goodwin has a knack for slanting his songs with a certain barbed edge and grounded realism. Chipper singer-songwriter fare isn’t his thing by any stretch. That said, it’s not all doom and gloom, and his reflections extend beyond inward-facing indulgence.

The varied instrumentation – Goodwin effortlessly switches from straight acoustic to full band with piano, bass and drums, even bursting into a surging crescendo on ‘Black Coffee and Bromide’ – makes for an album that doesn’t settle into a particular mode, and it’s this underlying sense of restlessness (‘I could never be content with contentment’ he remarks on ‘Heat Death’), paired with the tangible craftsmanship of the songwriting, -that makes it a standout.

Paul Goodwin Online

  author: Christopher Nosnibor

[Show all reviews for this Artist]

READERS COMMENTS    10 comments still available (max 10)    [Click here to add your own comments]

There are currently no comments...
----------



Goodwin, Paul - The Northern Lights in the Neon Tube