This EP, the follow up to Reading four piece Amy’s Ghost’s decentish debut ‘Lullaby’, starts with a dullish piece of folk pop, progresses through an experimental dirge and ends up with something utterly bizarre and unsettling.
Lead single ‘Paper Boat’ is barely middling Amy’s Ghost, dominated by a gruff, stolid cello line that struggles to stay in tune and throws vocalist Amy Barton off at certain moments. Indeed, Barton is off her game throughout the track, displaying little character or passion, and the dry, amateurish production does her singing no favours. The one pleasing element comes in her high-pitched warbling piano, redolent of the Arcade Fire’s unforgettable ‘Neighbourhood #1’, but the song as a whole is pallid and unfinished-sounding. Next draft, please.
A slightly more interesting number follows with the idiotically-titled ‘Call Your Dub’, which I believe is a remix of an earlier AG song, ‘Call Your Name’. As I don’t know the original, I have to take the current record as the state of the art, and though it lacks substance it at least captures atmosphere. A rattling snare figure which reminds me a little of Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’ establishes the funereal tone and pace and from thereon in we get a spooky little tale of love and loss, which sounds negligible on first listen, but grows on you after the fourth. Again, the cello feels overdone and is tentatively played, but Adam Smith’s production is a little more sympathetic than on ‘Paper Boat’, enfolding the singer in ever more cavernous reverb, whirling winds and stacked strings until the whole thing vaporises into the morning mist.
Here’s an idea for an up and coming pop band: get your granny to sing one of your tunes and stick it on the end of your record! That will freak out the squares. If that was the thinking then it worked for me. Olga Searle, Barton’s grandmother, warbles out ‘These Eyes’, a nostalgic paean to lost love (a bit of an Amy’s Ghost speciality) over some attic-dusty upright piano, which possesses a faint flavour of Schubert. Although the old girl gets a bit creaky towards the end, the performance is arresting, and makes you think anew about pop music, and how its meaning (if it now has any) can be changed by placing sentiments usually associated with youth into the mouth of a much older person. The results are sometimes repulsive (Tom Jones’s continuing career represents exhibit A for the prosecution), but in the present case they are strangely moving.
Still, the verdict overall is that this band has stalled a bit. The singing is not up to Amy Barton’s standard, the production is patchy and the playing suspect in places. They have a visual style (everyone is plastered with Foundation Zombie and kohl-eyed), but perhaps they need to spend longer in the recording studio and less in the makeup studio.