SOPHIA'S mainstay Robin Proper Sheppard is no stranger to tragedy. The premature demise of his original band The God Machine came about when the band's bassist (and Robin's best mate) Jimmy Hernandez died from a brain tumour. The devastation of that life-changing experience fed the unremitting sadness of Sophia's legendary debut album 'Fixed Water' and since then the shadows massing around Proper Sheppard have urged him on to ever more illustrious feats of sonic achievement.
Consequently, it's difficult to imagine just how heavy a listen to an album described by this master of personal anguish as "possibly the darkest album I've ever made" will sound like. Not least when you discover that the bleakly-monikered 'There are no Goodbyes' is Robin's 'break up' album. Oh happy, happy day.
Yet despite the deep breaths and stiff drink this writer indulged in before plunging into the icy waters, it's important to remember that Robin Proper Sheppard also knows a thing or three about couching his self-lacerating vignettes in resonant tunes. Despite the apparent lack of any sunshine on the lyrical horizon, there's no denying the compelling rush of several of the album's initial brace of songs. The title track kicks us off, swelling into a mordant anthem of endurance in the face of impossible odds, while the stridency of 'A Last Dance (To Sad Eyes)' is not only totally irresistible, but even finds Robin urging himself on (“come on, come on! Sing this song!") in such a courageous fashion that you're with him all the way.
Long-term collaborator Calina de la Mare's string arrangements make themselves felt for the first time on the brittle and captivating 'Storm Clouds', while the crunchy'n'chewy bittersweet pop (yes, POP) of 'Obvious' may find our hero raking over the embers of his burnt out relationship ("and why do we fight it, deny it, defy it?") but it hits home the way The Cure can when they pen one of their intermittent 'In Between Days'-style affairs.
Admittedly, an especially dark night of the soul does begin to engulf the album from there on. Amid a supreme swirl of strings and Tindersticks-y grace, 'Something' finds guest Astrid Williamson (Goya Dress/ 4AD collective The Hope Blister) adding a shadowy, self-help vocal to Proper Sheppard's damning self-appraisal (“cuz I'm a fuck up and a nightmare" ("no, you're a dreamer, I can see the light there")) in what amounts to a deeply sad, but deeply human outing. If it's possible, the intensity levels are ramped up to even greater heights on both 'Signs' ("you said you should have left me at Christmas and then again at Valentine's") and the self-explanatory 'Heartache', though the eeriest track of all is surely 'Leaving' where the ominously becalmed lyric ("sometimes I even scare myself with the shadows I cast"Â) is offset by a weird, brooding drone of a backdrop and some especially incongruous clarinet.
|
After this apparent personal nadir, it's a great relief to discover that - rather like Nick Drake's 'Pink Moon' - the LP ends with a ray of sunshine or sorts, courtesy of 'Portugal', where Robin makes a concerted effort to pull himself together and declares "I decided today I'm gonna be a better person...no it's never too late to change." Admittedly the skeletal chime of the music's hardly 'The Birdie Song', but you get the idea.
As a respite of sorts, the album comes gift-wrapped with a second disc featuring a full-length, live to radio performance given in Vienna on Valentine's Day 2009. Featuring Proper Sheppard backed by a string quartet led by the redoubtable Calina de la Mer, it's a respectful and generously-applauded affair and the elegiac strings prove to be the perfect accompaniment for Robin's scrubbed guitar and cracked confessionals.
The set list itself mixes and matches broken'n'bleeding early classics like 'So Slow' ("but death comes so slow when you're waiting to be taken"ÂÂ) and tracks like 'Signs' and 'Heartache' from the monolithic new album. Among the highlights are a double-whammy from 2006's fine 'Technology Won't Save Us' featuring a cool, energised version of 'Pace' and a superb 'Oh My Love'introduced with a tongue-in-cheek "let's try a sad pop song") which is all the more successful for having the gall to include one of the least Sophia-like lines ever: "why don't you open your eyes? You might like what you see!" Way to go, Robin.
We regularly trip out the superlatives when lauding praise on our melancholic Trans-Atlantic cousins like Bonnie 'Prince' Billy and Bill Callahan, yet in Robin Proper Sheppard we have a UK-based equivalent capable of sourcing the sadness with the very best of them. Thus, 'There are no Goodbyes' peers into his troubled psyche to an uncomfortably voyeuristic degree and vividly realises the darkness within. It's brave, but unrelenting and one can only hope the chink of light afforded by 'Portugal' isn't a false dawn because if anyone deserves to feel the warmth of the sun right now, it's surely Robin Proper Sheppard.
|
