For some reason, Matt Hales was always a far less annoying proposition that than the slew of whiney angst merchants who rode into town on Radiohead’s grand coat-tails. Perhaps it’s because, unlike the likes of JJ72 and Muse, Hales doesn’t spend entire interviews whinging about the absurd pomposity of bloated stadium rock, whilst simultaneously releasing records stuffed to bursting point with, er, bloated stadium rock. Nor is he prone to the kind of Simple Minds-like shrillness and Hugh Grant-ish mock humility so beloved of Chris Martin and Fran Healy.
Instead, Hales has ploughed his own furrow in an admirably single-minded and low-key fashion, deservedly earning himself a loyal following for his Tindersticks/ Joy Division-indebted brand of spectral melancholia. The follow-up to his Ivor Novello-nominated debut once again utilises a similar sonic palette, only now with added up-tempo optimism to balance out the soul-searching introversion.
The opening track and first single, ‘Brighter Than Sunshine’, for example, is a redress of previous form as dramatic as PJ Harvey’s ‘Good Fortune’, featuring as it does a stirring string arrangement and a defiantly upbeat lyrical tone (“When you’re standing next to me/What a feeling in my soul/Love burns brighter than sunshine.”)
However, as before, the down-beat laments are where the real magic lies. ‘Another Little Hole’ is a Smog-y meditation on the emotional minefield of the long-term relationship, with a strikingly raw lyric that doesn’t so much wear its Ian Curtis influence on its sleeve as have it bloodily scratched onto its naked chest (central refrain: “Love will tear us apart”).
Elsewhere, the album’s centrepiece, the plaintive piano-ballad ‘Extraordinary Thing’, opens adventurously with some harpsichord (betraying Hales’ classical training), goes on to paraphrase one of Winston Churchill’s famous war-time speeches (“This is not the beginning of the end/Though it may be the end of the beginning”), and overall puts this writer in mind of nothing so much as Nick Cave intoning doleful urban blues over the operatic, nocturnal phantasmagoria of the Third Eye Foundation’s ‘La Dispute’. Yes please, basically.
It’s definitely an acquired taste, and your balls are decidedly not in danger of being rocked off, but Still Life is still a highly impressive sophomore outing from one of the British indie scene’s best kept secrets.