Jeez, this doesn’t cut it, even as a guilty pleasure. Simon Davies, an admittedly accomplished acoustic guitarist, has put together an interminable suite of passionless tangos, dance-free rumbas and charmless English folk. It’s the dullest record I’ve had to review for many a month, so with a spirit of brevity sorely lacking on ‘For Utter Beauty’s Sake’, I’ll try and get it over and done with before we all drop off.
The key idea in the album is to try to fuse Latino song forms with an almost parodic English self-consciousness. No-one seems to have actually asked why this combination should have a remote chance of working or whether anyone would want to hear it . To be fair, such seemingly arbitrary combinations can sometimes be revelatory- no-one would have rationally designed the pairing of Paul Simon with a bunch of Soweto pop musicians, but the resulting ‘Graceland’, that eternally-odd fusion of fussy New York poetry bubbling through sun-drenched accordion music, turned out to be a masterpiece. Sadly, Davies is no Paul Simon, and none of his tunes is remotely memorable.
It doesn’t help that he sings like a bit of a wally, a queasy combination of Sir John Major and Mr Bean. His excruciating performance of ‘English Rumba’ is as clumsy as his protagonist, some repressed Hugh Grant nob who wants to dance with a generic South American beauty but can’t pluck up the courage. It should be light and charming but comes over instead as dreary, patronising and out of date.
As mentioned, Davies can play, and he is often supported by good instrumental contributions from collaborators Jon Fletcher on harmonica and Jane Griffiths on strings. In addition, he is capable of the odd zingy couplet, as on the pleasantly jazzy skivers’ anthem ‘No way Jose':
“Though the work is never-ending, I’ll go walking in the park
My workload’s pending but sod that for a lark….”
Still, the album as a whole is very hard going, and leaves you feeling exhausted and middle-aged just having it on the stereo. Why doesn’t this bloke take a long samba off a short pier?