Our pick of the albums reviewed on these pages during the past week is Novelty Island’s How Are You Coping With This Century?.
“There haven’t been many clever albums for a while, have there?”
“When we say clever, we don’t mean something that tries to teach you about nuclear physics or stuff like that. We mean, you know…clever.”
“Granted, one of the songs on How Are You Coping With This Century? gamely refers to a ‘double decker dodecahedron do,’ but Novelty Island – singer-songwriter Thomas McConnell – is a brainiac in more surprising ways than that.”
“On it you can hear the Liverpudlian doing things the right way; having an idea, thinking what might sound good about it and then thinking what the people listening to it might think.”
“That’s the clever bit, but it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a PhD in pop if you’ve no ear for a tune as well. Thanks though to an obvious devotion for Paul McCartney via Wings in their imperial period, the bones of McConnell’s debut album are consistently wholesome enough to rub shoulders with him and some of Merseyside’s other famous sons as well.”
