James Arden checks out the garage rockers latest album.
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A lot of artists who stay around long enough end up delivering a break-up album to the record stores at some point, and with Bella, folk rocker Teddy Thompson has proved he’s no exception. To give the man his due, reaching album number five before having to learn the secret handshakes and whatever else comes with joining that club is a reasonable feat, but then again, if the flesh is as sincere as the music, it’s hardly surprising.
If you’ll forgive me for scraping the barrel so much as to steal the words of an ogre-suited Austin Powers, this album is… rather like an onion, a perfectly palatable but rather nondescript and tasteless onion at that. But give it time and a couple of spins – those layers peel back and end up revealing something strong enough to make you cry. Okay, so maybe that’s taking it a little far, but I’d like to think that it isn’t all that far wide of the mark. Listening to easily the most personal eleven songs he’s ever written, you feel like you’re sitting inside Teddy’s thoughts as he wrestles with them on an emotional rollercoaster ride.
It begins with lead single ‘Looking for a Girl’, an upbeat, rock ‘n’ rolling breath of fresh air, with Thompson ready for the chase of the perfect girl “who knows how to love me”, but this optimism is soon tempered (and then some) by the fragility of the introspective ‘I Feel’, the almost grovelling ‘Tell Me What You Want’, and the album’s overriding sense of contrite resignation as expressed in songs such as ‘Take Me Back Again’ and ‘Take Care of Yourself’.
One thing that hits me when I listen to this record, or perhaps more accurately doesn’t hit me, is the instrumentation. The power of Thompson’s lyrics and flawlessness of their delivery are simply so captivating, that a solid and actually quite tastefully varied backdrop to them goes almost completely unnoticed. For all I know, one of the songs could be set to a solo kazoo playing the tune to Jingle Bells. I literally wouldn’t be 100 percent confident in saying otherwise.
In the space of forty minutes, Teddy Thompson finally steps clear of his parents’ shadow with this gorgeously heartfelt album, and moves himself from a decent enough songwriter scraping a living by backing up Rufus and Martha Wainwright and contributing the odd song to a film about gay cowboys, to a rival of the absolute best. If this isn’t the pinnacle of his career, then we have a lot to look forward to.
If you don’t hear this album, you’re missing out. And if it doesn’t manage to dig out a bit of hopeless romantic in you, however deep it’s buried, then you’ve got a heart colder than a Siberian mountaintop I’m afraid. I can’t really say it’s an enjoyable listen, but damn, it’s a good one.
★★★★★
Like This? Try Bryan Adams, 11; Blake Shelton, Blake Shelton; Bruce Springsteen, Nebraska.
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