This debut album from Wimbledon based solo-artist Jake Bailey is, according to his press notes, an effort to recapture the sound of a song he heard in a dream ten years ago. The ‘dream song’ he describes is one ‘that thrummed and swayed, like the long sunset grass of an English field’, which is a reasonably apt description of the lazy, hazy track All Our History which opens the record, an electronic drum beat, lightly plinking keys, swathes of wispy synth and Jake’s vocal layered into a sleepy fog. It’s got that lucid quality that he seems to be striving for, and is a mellow, summery introduction to this LP.
Less successful is Affinity, beginning as a mellow pop song it transforms into a twirling swirly X&Y-era Coldplay tune as performed by David Gray, which might be a match made in Heaven for some, but it’s a slightly out of focus piece, that though it has some lively drumming and nice, sweeping synths it doesn’t quite lift the spirit in the way it seems to be striving for. Similarly the romantic ballad Bloodstream has a radio-friendly, bright feeling, kind of Damien Rice-like at times, but it feels a little too earnest, though it’s pleasant at best.
Unfortunately the upbeat Infatuation Never Dies is a processed-feeling pop number, Bailey – who played everything on and produced the whole record – drowns himself in layers of instrumentation, there’s a certain Turin Brakes-vibe squirrelled away in amongst everything, but it all becomes a little too gaudy and decorated, where something perhaps a little more restrained might have worked better. Bailey’s voice works better when used as a soft contrast to his arrangments such as the choruses on When Love Calls, however on that tracks verses his voice is harsh and sharp in the mix, that track does, though, build to the record’s first successful ‘anthemic’ conclusion, a nice choral layering of voices over which Bailey calls “It’s time!”, the instrumentation slowly trickling away leaving just the sombre piano.
Youth is a better balance, a downtempo drum-beat, ambient synths, pensive piano and Bailey’s voice is pitched just right singing ‘Flying high through this cloudless sky’ with a fittingly weightless vibe before the track bursts into an uplifting clatter of reverberating drums and woozy synth. The bare production of One Liner sounds strangely similar to Christmas favourite Chris De Burgh‘s A Spaceman Came Travelling.
Penultimate track Shades of Summer is a buoyant, number going from lilting verses into pleasingly upbeat choruses. After which Little One is a bit of an anti-climax, a creaky acoustic guitar led tune that has a fleeting resemblance to something like Eels‘ at their most sentimental, it looks to end the record on a bittersweet note but feels a little too out of left-field to really form an appropriate bookend.
A decent ten track album, it drifts along quite merrily with a few songs that manage to make an impression here and there. Bailey has a good ear for production, though occasionally gets a little carried away, but his arrangments are generally consistently interesting. I think overall the problem with the record is a little lack of personality, sure, these are fine songs, but they are sometimes so breezy that they’ll just drift away once you’ve heard them, much like that dream song that evades Bailey’s grasp.
[Rating:3]
