It’s true to say that Robin Proper-Sheppard is a man whose reputation precedes. Indeed, it’s virtually impossible to mention him without referring to the harrowing and untimely premature end of his influential previous band The God Machine when his bassist and best friend Jimmy Hernandez passed away suddenly. Understandably devastated, Proper-Sheppard formed SOPHIA and made the stripped back and unremittingly bleak ‘Fixed Water’ album in an effort to come to terms with what had happened.
Unwittingly, Robin had made an album that his subsequent output would inevitably be compared with, but while this reviewer must confess he’d rather lost touch with Sophia in recent years, the sombre, but strangely hopeful ‘Technology Won’t Save Us’ makes it abundantly clear that Proper-Sheppard continues to evolve and engage us with his resolutely personal and frequently moving muse.
Not that ‘Technology…’ casts TOO many rays of sunshine, mind. The intensely elegiac instrumental title track (which morphs from a skeletal intro into full-on baroque/orchestral grandeur) concerns the true story of a father and his nine year-old son who were drowned off the Cumbrian coast. The album’s title refers to their cries for help heard by helpless would-be rescuers via mobile phone, but the string-drenched requiem Proper-Sheppard has written in tribute is truly a thing of potent, dignified beauty.
The intensity rarely lets up after that, either. Yes, there are a few slightly lighter-hued moments such as the OST leanings of the dusk-y ‘Twilight At The Hotel Moscow’ - which recalls both Talk Talk and the terminally under-rated Bark Psychosis – but mostly Proper-Sheppard excels in both string and horn-scarred chamber-pop delights like ‘Birds’ and the glorious ‘Where Are You Now?’ or the bitter, opiated acoustic introspection offered by songs like ‘Weightless’ and ‘Big City Rot’: this latter finding Robin coming on like a younger, gruffer Peter Perrett and indulging in a sideways swipe at London itself when he sings “I just realised I can’t afford to live in this city/ But who cares? No-one smiles and the weather’s shitty.” Thoroughly well observed, young man.
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Curiously, though, it’s the album’s faster moments that leave the most lasting impression of all. The gotta-be single ‘Pace’ may be dogged by Proper-Sheppard’s ever-pervasive melancholy and a chorus that runs “We can’t change the pace the world spins around us,” but its’ musical backdrop is hugely bracing, with more than a touch of the rarely-celebrated Undercut about it. Equally good is the nervy and bizarrely-titled ‘P1/P2 (Cherry Trees & Debt Collectors), which raises the ghosts of introspective giants like Joy Division and The Sound and – best of all – ‘Lost (She Believed In Angels)’ which finds Proper-Sheppard bravely choking his way through lyrics like “I still believe in the goodness of man despite the evil in my world” and creating arguably the most moving four minutes you’ll hear in any given twelve month spell.
In typically quixotic fashion, he signs off with the cod-cyber-metal instrumental ‘Theme for the May Queen No.3’, reminding me of nothing more than the way in which an equally psychically-stressed Evan Dando closed the therapy-first ‘Car Button Cloth’ ten years ago. Clearly, Robin Proper-Sheppard remains a man walking through a vale of pain and shadows, but his talent remains every bit as intact as his melancholic bent. We need to let more characters of honesty and courage like him into our own muddled worlds.
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