High it’s not. And if you were lucky enough to be high coming to it, The Blue Nile’s fourth album in twenty years would sober you up quick sharp.
It’s a surprising thing. They’ve never been The Polyphonic Spree exactly, never likely to bang out ‘Lust for Life’ as a B-side, but their meditations on love and city life have always been engaged, energised and intensely alive. There are moments like these on High, burning moments, but there are also moments when Paul Buchanan seems nothing but tired, wanting away from the world around him.
The conflict between the demands of the daily grind and the romantic dream of the good life is the top preoccupation. So ‘Days of Our Lives’, a song I keep expecting Dr Drake Ramore to drop into, depicts an everyday couple; she at home in her dressing gown all day, he stuck in interminable traffic, both wondering where their lives went —are these, they ask, the days of our lives? Fair question, but I can’t shake the feeling that the attitude to these one-dimensional characters is one, in part, of disdain.
‘High’ itself doesn’t assuage this fear. Honeyed though the singing is, surely any working person would be patronised by these sentiments: “Look at the morning people, going to work and fading away / Why don’t we stop the traffic / We could be high”. So if the drones all get out of our cars, make the M50 one big ‘Everybody Hurts’ video, we might find some meaning in our pitiful little lives? Please.
It’s frustrating, when elsewhere ‘Because of Toledo’ shows the grasp of nuance that characterises their best work, and respects its dramatis personae of people who know what it is to fail: “Because of Toledo, I got sober and stayed clean”. It reminds me of Raymond Carver and Five Easy Pieces, and I can’t praise it much more than that.
Buchanan is on safe ground too when he keeps it up close and personal, and so the propulsive, fantastically sung ‘Broken Loves’ hypnotises like ‘Broken Bird’ by John Cale, which it resembles not only in title but in its early eighties production values; while ‘Stay Close’ just kills me. God knows who Buchanan is singing to — a dying parent, a lover, a child — but it’s someone who could leave at any minute, and he’ll miss them when they go. He repeats, rapt, those words over and over—“Stay close to me / Stay close to me” — like an incantation, a spell that keeps you from ever being alone.
There’s magic here alright.