Like the jokes about the weather in New Zealand, if you don’t like what you’re hearing in Will Hanson‘s debut album Moving A Body, wait a moment. The climate change around track 5 is as stark as a hailstorm on a summer beach . Until that point, there is sufficient preponderance of piano based singer confessional to send you looking for your Damian Rice and Badly Drawn Boy CDs.
I’m not saying it like it’s a bad thing, one of these early tracks, ‘The View From Ebury Bridge’, has the hallmarks of singalong summer anthem, just right for an August when it isn’t raining for a change. The tipping point track – ‘In Her Loving Memory’ – sits squarely across this weather front – for 30 seconds you’re in the same groove as the last four and then the back beat and orchestral engine room kicks in with all the rush of sugar candy cut with caffeine and paracetamol. It made me sit up with a jolt – a trick it hasn’t lost in half a dozen spins. The glorious thing is that this intelligent-pop turbo charge is just in time to turn you on to some poignantly narrative lyrics about a mind trip that takes place over the course of a snow bound Glasgow night. By the time we get through an extended bridge that hangs together despite all odds, the whole affair has become as expansive as the closing scenes of Thelma and Louise. The rest of the album stays right with it from that point; majestically brooding with empathic tales of mass murderers and abattoirs.
So, like the day I asked for directions to Dublin and was told that I should drive somewhere else and then set off from there – if you want some Badly Drawn Rice, of high enough quality to be sure, start at the beginning. If you want the really good stuff, start at track 5 and enjoy an entirely different journey. From there on in it might just be in instant classic territory; you can come back to explore the earlier quietudes later.
Release date: 22nd August 2011
