On first glance, THE LODGER seem to be presenting wholemeal flapjack in a brown paper bag from a dull Northern Town. Very nice, very good for you. Very real.
But a couple of bites in and BLOODY HELL! IT'S CHERRY PIE! WITH CREME FRAICHE"!
To be honest, GROWN-UPS is the very epitome of deceptively plain. It's mostly one voice, one guitar and simple (ish) bass and drums. It has rueful indie songs with Ben Siddall's long face and sad eyes. One song even mentions bed-sitters. But with the application of perfectionist hard work, (three or four rejected songs to every one included), production by Alyn Smith and a fierce talent for dropping smart words onto agile, sticky tunes the album is utterly charming. From beginning to end.
It would have worked as seven very good singles (each with a great B side). But as a 14 track album it has hardly been off my sound system for two weeks. Each new song comes in as a delightful surprise, each contending to be the favourite. Greedy little things.
It has already sold 6,000 copies in Japan, long before the UK release of the full 14 track version. I'm quite sure there will be shopfuls of customers for this very distinctive and remarkably catchy set of songs in lots of English towns. And its genuine, unaffected Englishness will endear it to many others besides.
Themes are universal, observation is sharp, tunes are memorable and the emotional undertow is very compelling. Like THE SMITHS, or other masters of the ascent from mopes to smiles, THE LODGER create precious little stabs of joy to puncture the gloom of life's small (but heartbreaking) setbacks.
For me the lights all went on, as far as THE LODGER goes, when I saw them at Leeds Festival, on a sunny afternoon in 2006. The smiles got longer and wider with each new bitter-sweet song. Siddall has a well-developed sense of what a song needs to stand up on its own accord. Each time I've fired up the CD I've felt the same bursts of surprised pleasure to find so many tunes to sings along with, so many wry lines and so many perfect injections of unexpected or artfully constructed effects. Almost everywhere the taut energy of the music grips the lyrical misery and beats it into optimism.
"My beloved ray of light's / Been talking to the wall tonight / And dreaming of the girl she might have been"
Is a typically bleak and intensely compressed verse. The contradictory rhyming couplet, setting light against night in the grim situation of self-pity says so much with so few words. The internal rhyme with "dreaming" and "might have been" pretty well nails this to the cross of despair. But the music is a lush waltz-time, synth-strings-decorated dance that puts warm arms around the miserable couple who are trying to make something work. It cheers up the listener even as the project seems to fail. The line "This is wonderful, I'm a lucky boy" has the best tune - the memorable, swaying, sing-along bit that stays long after the sad realities have faded. The whole song ("Bye Bye") has even more to it than that though, sweeping through at least seven years of a relationship so successfully that a listener can get a serious dose of nostalgia by the time its six minutes is done.
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"You Got Me Wrong" has some set pieces: the train, a lost love, missing and being missed; it has melodramatic renunciation and visually neat touches of mundane northern reality - a romantic heartbreak packed into just 33 of its deftly chosen, carefully edited words: "Farewell to the world /Farewell to the girl / Farewell to the world / You got me wrong! / This train is taking ages / So many useless towns /A man collecting wages / A girl collecting frowns". That stopping train from Sheffield to Leeds is, it has to be said, not a good experience for an emotionally fragile soul.
"My Advice Is On Loan" has a hint of Johnny Marr's fascination with that singing treble guitar line set against a dancing bass that came into Thatcher's Dismal England via African bands like The Bhundu Boys. Its heroic cheerfulness transforms the despair of the lyric into something redemptive and optimistic: "And I can't explain / Why I live in a bed-sit / Like I have no shame". The simplicity of such words is no easy achievement. They sound perfect, they bounce off the tune and rush through the tempo so that every syllable can be heard, understood and appreciated. This is craftsmanship of a kind that reminds me (bear with me, I am old) of Buddy Holly. There is some sharp judgement in the words too - Siddall's creative use of the word "copyist" should soon replace "scenester" as putdown of choice amongself absorbed indivdualists everywhere.
Try as I might I can’t find a duff song on the album. The lost art of sequencing is back in the frame too. From each depth, we are offered sight of warm uplands. From a slower tune, we’re pulled half running, scarf trailing, into a charging tune like "Kicking Sand".
What else can I say? After a couple of days of wading through the dross of local bands on myspace it's such a pleasure to sit down with an album that delivers such a wealth of intelligence and emotional luxury with such economical precision. And, it has to be said, such self-effacing charm: "Oh mother I just want to be original / I want to stand out in the crowd / I just want to be a peacock / But I don't think it's allowed"
Precisely. Very precisely.
www.myspace.com/thelodgerleeds
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