There are plenty of good reasons for me to dislike Michael Lee. In increasing order of relevance: he’s young, he’s good looking, he plays about thirty instruments more than me, his album sounds like someone’s spent a billion quid on it, and he lists Sting and Phil Collins as influences. Yup, you read that right, someone below the age of sixty still rates that gurning, rat-faced, rat-voiced, wife-divorcing-by-fax, fake-social-conscience-baring gorilla-drumming puke-for-brains dickhead. And the most interesting thing Sting’s done in the past twenty years is have sex with Trudie, his wife. Good on you, mate.
Still, when you divest yourself of all that annoying baggage, you have to admit: this is a very impressive record. More than that, it’s evidence of comprehensive talent. It’s not that Lee plays everything under the sun (he leaves the drumming to Will Gates, a superb player in his own right), but that the arrangements of his clever, puzzle-box prog-folk-rock songs are put together with such authority, with none of the kid-in-the-candy-store overkill of a typical young musician given the keys to a studio for a week and told to knock himself out.
The album opens with ‘Land of Change’, a compound of complex triple-time Weather Report-style jazz fusion with a contrastingly sweet folky chorus Steely Dan might have written if they had been brought up in deepest Dorset. Lee’s light tenor singing is accomplished without being exceptional, but his voice in the multitracked passages is effortlessly beautiful. The reggae-influenced middle section may not be for everyone but functions to send the song off in a new direction (cleverly illustrating the song’s theme) via a satisfyingly tiny guitar solo.
‘Trust’ has that rare thing for a prog rock song, a tune you can remember. There’s a touch of The Police’s ‘Every Little Thing She Does is Magic’ in the very clean textures of the chorus, which still retains a sense of movement and urgency. In places, it’s a little oversung, but Lee economically gets the picture of a thwarted, constricted lover across, and the virtuosic ensemble playing near the end doesn’t feel out of place. It’s as if the resentful, claustrophobic protagonist’s only outlet for his suppressed violence is his guitar.
It may be faint praise to say that ‘Tired’ sounds like prime soundtrack material for the boy-loses-girl module of a dodgy American rom-com, but hey, a musician’s got to eat. And, I admit, it’s kind of pretty, with a tinkly, Marc Cohn piano break, lightly sighing strings and pristine boy-band harmonies. ‘In the Picture’ continues the album’s dalliance with the mainstream, with its gossamer guitar picks and Lee’s white soulman singing, but it’s done to exacting standards and would make Radio 1 sound a little more sophisticated and intelligent if they picked up on it. More to my taste is the lovely little mandolin tune ‘Distant Future’, which breathes the air of a West Berkshire wheatfield in summer and benefits from Martyn Drabik’s rustic tenor.
In these austere days, when you get the impression that bands may have to eventually revert to washboards and comb-and-paper, ‘Face Forward’s opulence feels distinctly odd. But if you allow a certain tension between the crowd-pleasing and more esoteric numbers, and factor in a level of lyrical naivety, the album is still a brilliant, rich accomplishment from an indisputable talent. He just needs to forget that ‘…But Seriously’ was ever written.