A few of you may have read Bret Easton Ellis’s dystopic masterpiece, ‘American Psycho’, in which well-groomed yuppie Patrick Batemen spends half his time composing cheesy reviews of MOR dullards like Genesis, Whitney Houston and Huey Lewis and the News, and the other half brutally murdering beggars and prostitutes. One reviewer, while deploring the appalling levels of misogynistic violence, described it as effectively skewering ‘a society fatally addicted to blandness’.
After a couple of listens to ‘A Moment’s Silence’ by folk-pop duo My Friend Rachel, I was beginning to understand what that writer meant. It’s not good for the soul to listen to such mercilessly soothing music: one needs a bit of grit in the oyster, otherwise all you get is mush.
The pedigree of the group is unarguable. Martin Newton is a smart and sympathetic producer, while Katherine Hieronymus has the flawless grace and ease of Karen Carpenter, but the evidence from this album is that they really need to hire a songwriter. In the place of hooks we have gimmicks and in the place of tunes we have an eternal, unrippling smoothness.
Try listening to, say, ‘Put Me Right’, to see what I mean. It’s nominally a vaguely sinister piano ballad, but never reaches any emotional intensity, due to the tunelessness of the vocal line and the fiddly, fussy structure, containing time shifts, breakdowns, an annoying squeaky noise at the end, and a hackneyed ‘Mr Cholmondley-Warner Talks about Love and The Act of Beastliness’ section in the middle. Taken as a whole, this is the sound of intelligent artists trying desperately to chuck stuff onto a deadly dull song and hope we won’t notice its underlying morbidity.
A bit better is ‘Connected’, which has a pretty chorus, matched by Newton’s equally pleasant swirling, textured guitars. But boredom is never far away on this album. It oozes through the lyrics (“I get sick of it all”, “I got bored with it all”), and through the endless, mid-tempo drum-machined drudgery of lame ballads like ‘A Good Day’, which suddenly goes all African tribal on us at the end. As I said, gimmicks.
I think it is possible to get pleasure from this record, but the trick is to dip into it for a couple of minutes and then go somewhere else. I quite liked the accordion-drenched ‘Soured His Mood’, whose carnivalesque ‘Being For the Benefit of Mr Kite’ oddness was hinted at by the Fellini-ish cover photographs (in one there is a sexy girl in her underwear being ogled by a glum looking naked bloke- pure ‘Battle in Heaven’. In the other, there is another girl asleep on a park bench next to a clown and a large monkey). Sadly, the risqué playfulness of these images is not matched by the rest of the music, which is stolid, bordering on ultra-conservative.
But that’s enough about My Friend Rachel. Just before I go off to wipe down my axe, I have to inform you that Messrs Rutherford, Collins and Banks really hit their stride with progressive classic ‘The Lamb Lays Down on Broadway’……