Depending on whether you prefer surprise or consistency in your life, Sheffield’s Slow Cub are either insatiably experimental or frustratingly fickle.
Over three albums (discounting last year’s covers album) Rebecca Taylor and Charles Watson have juggled through sonic balls of folk, skiffle, country, indie pop and soul, but even if they are experiencing a seven year long identity crisis, there hasn’t been too much to grouse about. Among the trying on of various genre masks, they’ve managed to turn out a sturdy handful of satisfying tunes with each record.
And little has changed in that respect on their fourth LP, the chipper sounding ‘One Day All Of This Won’t Matter Anymore‘.
They ventured out to the States to record it in Matthew E. White‘s Spacebomb Records studio; with White himself sliding the faders and cart blanche of the in-house band, once again the pair have yawed the paradigm, this time mostly towards the sedentary pace of easy listening. Music to put on before bed, as Watson alluded to recently.
Watson opens ‘One Day…’ with the cotton-cosy ‘Where The Lights Get Lost‘, a song that Fleetwood Mac‘s ‘Albatross‘ could have been if Peter Green had cared for words, and follows up with the equally idle drum of ‘Ancient Rolling Sea‘. As inoffensive and homey as these track are, simmering away is a sense of warming up for bigger tokens to come, because Slow Club’s main entry point is Taylor’s vocals. At times during their career her lungs have felt powerful and sweet enough to turn the taste of honey sour, so it’s curious that it takes until third number, ‘In Waves‘, before she pops up as the solo voice.
Immediately, the emotional barometer is increased through a country-styled lament where pedal steel guitar and an inspired coda more than endorse the presence of the extra band hands. On the waltzing ‘Give Me Some Peace‘, the duo are as close to the soulful clout that freckled the previous album ‘Complete Surrender‘.
Upbeat salvos like this are isolated incidents though. The summer strokes of ‘Tattoo Of The King‘ and Taylor’s Chrissie Hynde impersonation on ‘Champion‘ peaking the energy limits elsewhere, ‘Rebecca Casanova‘s steady thrust, however pleasant, is a mushy pop melody too far. The ballad ‘Come on Poet‘ might just well surpass anything in Slow Club’s oeuvre though. “I can’t take on the tiger when I’m still this child” Taylor hurls out in stupefying melismas that would make any X Factor contestant go back to their day job and stay there.
With Taylor now living in Margate and Watson in London, and each writing separately, it’s perhaps unsurprising that duets in earnest between them are at an all-time low. Only once, on ‘Sweetest Grape On The Vine‘, do they come together under a whispery wave of immaculate harmonies and a clavinet that sounds suspiciously reggae. What is becoming a praxis of tagging secret tracks on the end of albums (it’s more an open secret now, guys) continues with the eponymous ‘One Day All Of This Won’t Matter Anymore‘.
A hymnal heartbreak that ends by reciting its bleak title and a postscript that, whichever sound Slow Club root for next, they’ve done their bit for pessimistic pop.
