Jim, Iggy, Bowie, David Johansen: every other blade reared on snotty punk rock and white noise shock therapy just wants to be an old crooner when he grows up. Ken Griffin started out with Dublin noiseniks Rollerskate Skinny before getting lost and finding himself in Brooklyn. He woke up after a decade in the wilderness, bought a cheap nylon-string and figured out how to write Proper Songs you could busk on a street corner without getting done for noise pollution.
The Great Deal of Love is Favourite Sons’ second album, and a peach it is too. Griffin’s no kid, and these songs testify to a life lived arse-backwards. The record wears its influences like tattoos (Scott Walker, Lee Hazlewood, Van), but remains way more than the sum of its record collection.
Consider the mutant rhumba of ‘Safe For All Seasons’, with its side orders of handclaps, rollicking piano, conga-line and mob chorus. Or the Catskills sway of ‘Sweet Upon The Vine’. Or the rumbling country gothic of ‘Forget My Name’, like JC fronting Crime & the City Solution with a free jazz saxophonist along for the ride. The Iggy-goes-cabaret of ‘Pretty Young Blood’ (“I look for love in all the wrong places”). The arch shoo-be-do shuffle of ‘Twilight Man’.
Griffin has a serious set of pipes, and if his songs conjure images of sweaty, sleazy men in dark suits conducting shady lock-ins in Russian mobster restaurants on the wrong end of Raindog Town, well, sometimes it pays richly to see how the other half live.