This writer was quite enamoured with Ilford-born, Cambridge-based singer/ songwriter PAUL GOODWIN’S debut album proper, ‘Scars’ from 2008. The result of eight years hard labour, absolutely no budget and a lot of patient home recording, it was a mordant, introspective treat packed with songs often written from the end of an affair when the wheels had come off. If they’d ever started rolling in the first place, that is.
In a W&H interview at the time, Goodwin revealed that it took him a long time to craft his songs, so it shouldn’t surprise us that the follow-up ‘Trinkets & Offcuts’ should take a further three years to appear. Actually, whether it’s a ‘follow-up’ or not depends on how you view what we quaintly used to refer to as a ‘mini-album’, because there are just seven tracks here (and the last is a CD-only, 'hidden track' 'Magnetic & Rhetorical'), but despite that and the record’s rather dismissive title, ‘Trinkets & Offcuts’ is a really fantastic little record where quality outweighs quantity with ease.
Apart from the raging crescendo at the end of ‘Borderline’, the only really pacy track on ‘Scars’ was the rattling ’60 Miles with a Slow Puncture’, so I didn’t expect opening tune ‘This Place is Dead Anyway’ to sound so bright. The title suggests a miserable, low-key acoustic strummer, but after the count-in, we get an enthusiastic folk-rocker brimming with confidence and a full-band sound, with long-term acolytes Mike Barnes (drums) and David Greeves (electric guitar) on hand to round things out. Sure, Paul’s still suffering from love’s slings and arrows, but he endures with wit and wisdom intact (“if she’s lowered her sights, she’s squarely in mine”) and he again brings Billy Bragg favourably to mind in the vocal sense.
OK, so - save for the jaunty 'Magnetic & Rhetorical' - there’s nothing else quite as breezy here, but there’s nothing less than wholly engaging either. On the cute, concise ‘You Won’t Break My Heart’, Goodwin tries anything and everything not to let an old temptation beat him a second time (“I won’t dream about you two nights out of three”), while the initially bleak and skeletal folk-blues ‘Ball and Chain’ gets seriously ominous when the band kick it up the arse and Goodwin’s desires (“Wear my ring my love/ we can settle down to watch each other die”) border on the murderous.
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More familiar themes of alcoholic abandon and romantic failure (“I dry up when I dry out”) float to the surface the wonderfully downbeat ‘Ghost of Paddy’s Night Past’, but we’re on track five – ‘Nothing to Say’ – before the stark introspection riddling ‘Scars’ again dominates on a song where love has gone cold and a weary Goodwin throws in the emotional towel. “Turn off the light when you leave, by way of goodbye”, he sings with a resignation bordering on numb ennui at one stage. The following ‘Closure’ continues the theme of raking over the embers of a love long burnt down (“I’d give half of what I have/ to be half of what I was before you wore me down”), but while it’s a predominantly acoustic guitar and vocal workout, Hannah Haynes is on stand-by to add vocal support and a graceful violin is on hand to bring it all back home.
‘Trinkets & Offcuts’, then, is anything but a collection of sonic bric-a-brac and cast-offs that should be left to moulder in a dark charity shop. Instead, it’s a finely-wrought collection of songs and moods and lets some light and, dare I say it, a little boldness into Paul Goodwin’s lovelorn world. While what passes for a recording contract is hardly worth the paper its’ printed on these days, this is one guy who deserves a chance to build on these advances with help from a bigger budget and an audience larger than just the friends he has on Facebook. Get this and fall precariously in love.
Paul Goodwin online
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