New York singer/songwriter DAVID FRANCIS is a true magpie with his music taste, taking bits from here and there and arranging them in various guises from classic pop through folk-ish balladry to theatre musical. ‘Fake Valentine’ is his second album of remarkably diverse but consistently interesting songs. The man himself looks decidedly old and slightly spooky in a Klaus Kinski kind of way but the voice and the emotion is far more comforting.
On ‘Life Smiled’ he’s a cross between Wings era McCartney and – gulp – Chris de Burgh. ‘Reflections In The Mirror Of The Life I’m Wearing’ skirts dangerously close to The Kink’s ‘Sunny Afternoon’ while the instrumental song cycle of ‘Song For A Party Never Held’ sounds like the overture to a musical. By the time we reach the darkly toned ‘Far’ he’s found his Lennon-esque inner demon and translated it for the Indie crowd.
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Too varied in style and presentation to feel like a coherent album, ‘Fake Valentine’ is more like a random selection of classy songs from a jukebox of unknown artists whose music a long while back “fell off the radar”.
Or in other words file under Intriguing.
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