Month: September 2023

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Regency Cafe, Tom Blackwell

On a recent trip to Middlesbrough, on Unspun Heroes business, so I was played an album that is about to come out on vinyl. (Yes, an Unspun Hero can be something that is fresh and new and not-quite-released on a plastic disc.) I sat back with a cup of tea and a biscuit and listened. The background hum of the office I was in just faded away and I was sucked into the music so deeply I could have sworn I’d been dreaming.

I hadn’t. What I’d experienced was Tom Blackwell’s latest album. And what a stunning collection it is.

This is an album of musical minimalism that somehow appears to be fuller than expected. Guitar and harmonica, it’s easy to immediately think of Dylan. Yet, I think it’s fair to state that Tom is producing music that is on par with those early Zimmerman acoustic songs, but perhaps with more of a Donovan folksy feel, shot through with notes of Americana to give each of the songs their own unique flavour.

His biography has a line in it that sums Tom’s musicality so perfectly, it deserves repeating: “Blackwell sings his songs as if he is living them.”

Indeed.

And as a listener you feel as if you’re living them alongside him. Oh, these must be a delight to hear live (although, as they’re a one-take recording with just a microphone, captured at his home, I suppose you actually are). Remarkable tunes, each and every one of them.

They’re almost a decade old, which means Tom has sat with these gems inside and alongside him, and it’s this that creates such a depth not only to the songwriting but to the playing. He says they’re a collection of love songs to a café in Pimlico, London, where he used to find himself after walking for hours. He suggest listening to them late at night, which I think it probably right. With a whiskey sour, perhaps, and friends. I think you’ll find yourselves stunned into silence, perhaps the occasional murmur of appreciation leaking from mouths at the end of each track.

Buying a copy of this to play late at night in my own home was an easy decision. I’d made it the moment I came back to myself in that office in Middlesbrough. I urge you to give this a listen, and I think you’ll come to the same conclusion. There are only 200 copies of this available on vinyl – well, 199 at least – and I doubt they’ll hang around for long, except in your own record collection and in the memories of those who are lucky enough to have heard Tom Blackwell. Listen and buy via Tom’s Bandcamp.

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Milo Greene, Milo Greene

Impressionistic painting of a man, looking to the left.

I admit it. I love pop music.

Let’s just add some clarity to that statement, while you pick yourself up from the floor. Pop music is a lot of things. It’s melodic. It’s catchy in a way that makes you tap your feet or hum the tune. It’s usually, but not always, sub-four minutes. The Cure are as much a pop band to my ears as Taylor Swift. Pop is not throwaway, though. It’s not the musical equivalent of an airport paperback. That’s muzak. Or Coldplay.

So, now that’s settled, it’s time to talk about a particular pop band, although they may not describe themselves that way. Milo Greene.

They’re pop because they have those catchy tunes that you want to hum, like a lot of their debut album’s tracks, including Perfectly Aligned and Take a Step. The harmonies, the effortless way it burrows into your conscience and lodges there for days. The final track on this record, Autumn Tree, is as captivating as the first notes on opener, What’s the Matter.

Released in 2012, like a lot of great pop music, it sounds contemporary. Yet there’s also nostalgia wrapped up in these songs. It makes sense that the band is comprised of seasoned songwriters, showcasing their craft. It makes sense that they started wanting to write songs that would be used in TV series and films, which possibly comes from their LA roots.

Yet, despite their commerciality and obvious success in their home country, I think they’ve managed to steer clear of the schmaltz, which is likely down to the harmonised vocals alongside obvious musicianship rather than leaning on studio techniques. This means their sound tends more towards peers such as The New Pornographers than it does your average pop act. Just enough indie, perhaps?

There’s authenticity at play here, which when set against the plastic allure of LA is pause enough for thought. Yes, it’s manufactured like all good pop, but in clever ways. The band name came about as they decided to create a fictitious booking agent called Milo Greene so they could get shows early in their career. And inventing this persona, it obviously worked. They’ve since gone on to play Letterman, Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza.

So, yes, it’s pop music. But it’s not. Because like all good pop music it defies the ‘pop’ label as much as it defines it. Yes, they have almost 80 million plays of a track from this debut on Spotify, yet they’re relatively unknown outside their own country.

Give it a listen, you can’t tell me you’re not a fan of pop music, too.

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Genuflex, Genuflex

There have been a number of tribute albums to David Bowie over the years, especially since his untimely death in 2016. That very same year, an album came out by a band who had, to my mind, created one of the best covers of a Bowie track some six years previously. The band was Genuflex, the track was Soul Love, originally released on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

Video of Soul Love, a cover of the David Bowie track.

Of course, one member of Genuflex was already known to me: Finn Vine.

In the previous decade he’d been the singer and creative catalyst in White Rose Movement, a post-punk electronic band who were constantly fêted by the music media as the ‘next big thing’ yet never managed to reach their obvious potential. While their debut, Kick, was an excellent and coherent album, they crashed and burned in 2008 with their second album incomplete and unreleased.

Perhaps it was the post-punk element that held them back? If so, it’s the (almost complete) erasure of this side of their musical style from Genuflex’s only album to date, the eponymous subject of this post. Instead, they lean heavily on the synths, while employing Vine’s vocals to great effect. It’s really only on track three, Santantango, that you get a glimpse of what came before. Now the sound owes as much to Anthony and the Johnsons as it does to that mid-noughties guitar-based electronica White Rose Movement helped to define.

The band takes its name from the act of dropping to ones knees to pray, to genuflect. While that may be so, this isn’t a new church, rather the realisation of an artist’s true intentions and committed to tape.

One of the pieces of the band’s output that really stands out was a remix of their single, The Last Gods, from the late (great) Mark Stewart of Pop Group who sadly passed away earlier this year. This remains, perhaps, the only example, of where Genuflex could have headed had they kept going. The vocals are soaring heavenwards, the music the wings. It’s astonishing – and not just because of Stewart’s work.

Genuflex was as grandiose as Vine’s previous bands, yet remains one that flies below the radar. Undeservedly, I would like to think.

If the links above have tingled your spidey sense, then you’ll be delighted to listen to their one and only album. Yet another example of one of the music world’s Unspun Heroes.