I often mention, when reviewing Tom Minor’s fantastic contributions to the musical landscape, that one of the things that I appreciate is the oft-parochial nature of his narratives. His songs and the stories within them often take place in identifiable geographical locations or at least recognizable settings, and they are small stories of everyday people going on around us all the time. Kitchen sink dramas for the Just Eat generation! (or GrubHub if you are reading this on the other side of the Atlantic.)
But with a title such as “Expanding Universe,” it would be easy to think that he has left life’s backstreet backstages, the settings for his small-town operas, behind and headed off into the stratosphere. Well, yes and no. But mainly no.
“Expanding Universe,” although written a few months ago, is perfect for where the world finds itself today, a place where the big tech companies – the Four Henchmen of the Trumpocalypse as he calls them – egged on by the powers-that-you, have forgotten their own motto “don’t be evil” and have turned into at best a way of lining billionaires pockets, at worst a way of controlling what the population thinks.
And so this galloping indie song, part Squeeze-infused melodrama, part futuristic-religious hymn, lays out some home truths, truths that we are all aware of yet so caught up in the convenience and entrenchment of the webs they weave that we seem to do nothing about.
As always, Tom is on the case. More than just a singer of songs, he holds a mirror up to the world around us. In the past, it has been as just nighttime conversations and backstreet liaisons, the ebb and flow of the nine-to-five, the minute of normal life. Now, he writes large and gives us a soundtrack and narrative to…to what? The downfall of free society, the beginning of the end, the last dance before our own demise?
