Despite the title, thankfully, this new single from James Howard is miles away from the conclusions you might be drawing from the title alone. (Books and covers, eh?) In fact, drop the needle on the track and what you get is the opposite of that much-maligned musical form: a gentle and spacious piece, part half-sketch understatement, part music hall simplicity, part wistfulness, and part subversive play with the expectations that the title might have set up.
It’s much more Scott Walker than Bryan Adams, that’s for sure.
And the musical deftness is matched by the clever lyricism, with references not only to the images of power-ballad clichés and stadium pomp but also threaded through with recognisable lines plucked from such songs, reframed in quietness and quintessence of a simpler song to give them new, poignant and poetic meaning.
‘Power Ballads’ signals the arrival of Howard’s new album, Power Ballads and the Wash, eight songs which began life as simple demos before he took them to producer Mike Lindsay, co-founder of folktronica group Tunng, to be expanded upon. The charm here being that, thanks to the deftness and vision of both artist and producer, the songs remained beautifully unadorned, like delicate water colour paintings, brought to life as much from space as sonic hue; “lucid dream-esque reveries [that] are unmistakably London.”
Sonically translucent and deliberately unhurried, ‘Power Ballads’ is a brilliant calling card for an album that explores the search for those rare spaces buried in the hustle and bustle of the modern world, physically and otherwise, where quiet reflection and thus a more objective understanding of the world can still be found.
Power Ballads and the Wash – pre-save
