Up To Snuff

Ivan St John seems to have taken a lot of his things (including possibly his name) from pre-rock ‘n’ roll doo-wop acts, and so his record is soaked in close harmony singing and unusually sweet male vocals, accompanied by walking bass lines, picked guitar parts, electric pianos, kazoos, ukuleles and jazz flutes. Indeed, ‘Up to Snuff’ often sounds like something that wouldn’t be out of place on an episode of Jeeves and Wooster or in the background in a Noel Coward play (apart from the odd 21st century slang reference to smoking ‘skunk’ and ‘making out’).
Unfortunately, Ivan sometimes tries to take his whole shtick into the late twentieth century with a rocky strum and a harder edge in his voice, and at these points he’s, well, a bit less successful. ‘This is How We Play’, for example, sounds like an acoustic Muse, and nobody, not even Muse, want that. These diversions are a shame, because when Ivan St John returns to the lovely, pure, melodic and romantic strains of ‘Home’ it sounds like genuinely unexplored territory for the modern indie musician on the make. And ‘Mysterious Ways’, a gentle guitar-picked ballad about new love, is truly lovely.