As moribund as a damp Tuesday stopover at Birmingham New Street, this set of songs by former Place Above guitarist Ben Philips seems designed to elicit nothing but boredom and depression in the listener. Ben likes his Radiohead, but whereas Oxford’s finest anatomists of angst could take gloomy subjects and render them with stupendous drama and pathos, Ben simply strums his acoustic and moans and groans about various undefined subjects. As a singer, he can hold a tune reasonably well, and he can accompany himself pefectly adequately, but there seems nothing in the music that is uniquely his own: the same chords, the same stock phrases. the same sad-sack introversion, I’ve heard a hundred singer-songwriters in this vein. The nadir is the interminable ‘Open Prism’ which says nothing many times over but in ever drearier ways:
“So cold, can you see me now? Just longing to jump in the fire
Desperate to feel the heat and stop living life on the wire.”
Philips has played around Oxford a fair bit now, and his obvious competence will ensure that he can open an evening without making a chump of himself, but there seems nothing here to draw the attention; as you listen to this, you can almost hear the buzz of audience conversation over the top of it.