Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves

Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves can't but arrive as a Big Statement. The Virgin Prunes were always elitist, dissembling, treacherous spies in the house of Irish rock. Like Cathal Coughlan and Microdisney, Gavin Friday and the Prunes always rejected Irish codes of authenticity. There's no laddish delving among rock and roots here. What you see is assuredly not what you get.

But be careful about terming too precisely this modern cabaret. The second track, 'Tell Tale Heat' would be a standard AOR rock ballad in less abstruse hands than those of Friday, The Man Seezer and the New York henchmen whom producer Hal Williner has called up, while 'Man Of Misfortune' with its back-up vocals by Flo and Eddie both signals and repays Friday's teenage debts to Marc Bolan.

This could almost be two albums, the first side bookended between the title track and Bob Dylan's 'Death Is Not The End', being a pained and intensely private meditation on love and death. These aren't gossip-ridden cabaret confidences. Instead Friday offers interior monologues, disheartened ruminations over a wine-glass darkly.

The emotional landscape is often bleak and blasted. The songs veer between love's exaggerations and extinctions, its large and little deaths and all its hesitations amid the debris that's the aftermath of ego-loss. Gavin Friday hardly presents himself as a typical romantic believer. Rather, he traces two steps forward, then retreats one step back, fearful that he's only treading a circle of illusion and obsession on a revolving stage.

All of which means that 'Each Man…' is neither easy nor early-day listening. It will be faulted for self-absorption but that may mistake the symptoms for the true syndrome surrounding its creation. A major-label debut after a lengthy silence and change of artistic skin, it's true Gavin may be over-compensating, willing himself too hard to make that Big Statement when more relaxed sketches on the sky might have been more revealing.

Certainly there's more relief on the second side where Friday's concerns become less introspective, more public. 'He Got What He Wanted' could be about fame, God, drugs or any romantically exaggerated craving. And from 'Man Of Misfortune' onward, the tempo picks up and the playing gets a stormier, climaxing in the abrasive guitars of the closing 'Another Blow On The Bruise'.

I prefer the album when the arrangements don't try to be too deceptively soothing and sourly sedative as on the naked miniature of 'Love Is Just A Word' and 'Apologia', the album's most distinctive tune where the Man Seezer's piano carries the early weight. Or again when the players energize Friday on 'The Next Thing To Murder' and 'Rags To Riches', the self-penned song that's closest to conventional cabaret. And finally, when they gamble on the serene horn and electronic textures of 'Death Is Not The End'.

Each Man… works best when it isn't even-handed. It definitely confirms the skills of the Friday-Seezer partnership as songwriters – there's not one dud tune – but somehow I suspect it's unrepeatable. For once, someone had to give witness to the blows on the bruise but they can't keep scratching on the same scars.