Sometimes the choices presented to people are not always as obvious as they seem.
For Christoper Duncan, the reward of an unexpected Mercury Prize nomination for his diaphanous first album ‘Architect‘ was never likely to have been hijacking the industry’s glitterati; neither the record nor its affable creator are shallow enough to get to the heart of its glad-handing, insincere fulcrum.
For a more established artist, the received wisdom might have been to re-issue ‘Architect’ in the wake of its recognition in some kind of deluxe packaging, but instead we have this eponymously titled bridge between the past and the future – an EP containing four songs which grapple with the double headed beast of continuity and growth.
Almost true to formula, Duncan presents something old, something new, something covered and something from a BBC 6Music session. The latter is a versioning of ‘Garden‘ from which much of the harmonies have been stripped away, replaced by a seaside keyboard riff which lives somewhere between the beach and the bandstand, complete with handclaps and the sort of eccentricity that still lives on in the tiniest enclaves of Britain’s cobwebbed shires.
Opener ‘A Year Or So‘ arrives in the post-Mercury glow, filled up with jazzy guitar scribbles but oozing the sky-written qualities of its forebear – ba-ba’s and far horizons, a tale of the longing and the notepad scribbles made on a lazy afternoon.
It’s probably worth, in brief, recounting the back story for latecomers. The son of parents steeped in classical music, Duncan wrote and recorded his music via painstaking self sufficiency – a process that made its bygone, other wordly qualities all the more remarkable. As a guide post along the trail of how this process worked, the oldest track here – ‘The Age Of Love (Is The Wrong Age For Me)‘ – underlines the fine margins between creating amiable period pieces and subsequently developing the knack of turning the form into something more timeless and old-school romantic altogether.
If the measure of the confidence an artist feels in themselves is most obviously manifested in their choice of cover versions, our man must be feeling like a million dollars. The Cocteau Twins are after all something of a sacred cow; inscrutable, art-for-art’s sake yet capable of communicating beauty in hushed phrases and ecstacy, ‘Pearly Dewdrops-Drops‘ one of their standards. Wisely choosing to avoid Liz Frazer‘s one-of-a-kind delivery, Duncan instead leads the song into gentler, more bucolic waters with the feather-light slide, gently picked words and hushed strumming emphasising the delicacy and passion which are at the original’s root.
More than ever, being a musician is a path for which there are no maps: part way between taster and teaser, the quartet of songs here are effective as both, but the feeling they leave behind is as naggingly inconclusive as its sweetly fulfilled.
Very much a temporary residence, its creator’s next move promises to be fascinating.
