Currently celebrating 25 years in this filthy business and on the other side of an award for a Lifetime Achievement gong at the 2008 Meteor Awards, it would be tempting to suggest THE SAW DCOTORS can put their feet up and coast on the back of their established legend.
Hearteningly, our Galway heroes’ seventh album of all-new material – the self-explanatory ‘Further Adventures of the Saw Doctors’ – proves such thinking is wholly redundant. Recorded at well-known Welsh retreat Rockfield Studios (Bunnymen, Teardrops, Shack, Stone Roses) with producer Philip Tennant, it’s a typically bittersweet and melodic affair and more than capable of nuzzling up to their best work.
Having said that, much of ‘Further Adventures...’ reflects a rather more world-weary Saw Doctors than of yore. With the exception of ‘Well Byes’ – a chirpy, almost Beatle-esque paean to the dodgy Del Boy black market types kicking around in these recessionary times – Davy Carton and co are on perhaps less rogue-ish form than usual. Trailer single ‘Indian Summer’, with its’ graceful strings and autumnal sting, is merely one of a number of tracks here (see also ‘As The Light Fades’, the aching ‘Songs & Stars’) which are rather more sepia and dusky in hue than the primary colour Folk-tinged Pop the boys have made their own along the way.
This isn’t to say that they’ve forgotten how to pen rousing rockers, though. Opener ‘Takin’ the Train’ is a fiery, four-square Clash/ Levellers-style anthem of escape with typically impassioned vocals from Carton and descriptive guitar hero shapes thrown by Leo Moran, while ‘Friday Town’ and ‘Hazard’ will also satisfy large gatherings in muddy fields all over Europe and beyond.
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The album’s tear-jerker is surely ‘Someone Loves You.’ Kissed by strings, an emotional Carton vocal and the sort of lyrical directness (“while there’s a flame, you will always hear someone calling out your name/ don’t you know we’d be lost without you”) that can only come directly from the heart, it’s the sound of The Saw Doctors at their most poised and is as meltingly lovely as they come. It’s arguably the record’s finest, though it’s pushed hard by the closing ‘Goodbye Again’ where ruminations on mortality (“we’ll make the most of moments while we can/ we’ll write each other’s names in the sand”) are allied to a suitably epic arrangement to provide a fitting conclusion.
‘The Further Adventures of the Saw Doctors’, then, may be the sound of or Galway heroes sounding a little less invincible than they’ve seemed in the past, but with that maturity comes a wisdom and humanity that suits them to a T. This story’s far from over yet.
The Saw Doctors online
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