Sometimes it’s really good to confront your prejudices.
Sometimes, decades of music reviewing can make your heart sink over certain things. This can happen when you only read the press release. These might include reading the phrase ‘singer-songwrite’r, wherein you find yet another just okay but indistinguishable music maker who has produced something akin to too many other examples haunting your inbox. The fact that this was an album about fatherhood – even as one myself – made me wonder if this would be sickly sweet, insufferably earnest.
Sometimes I can make mistakes. Because the reality is that I had nothing to worry about and neither do you. Yes there may be artists that I could compare Luke De-Sciscio to – Elliott Smith and Nick Drake spring to mind. Believe me, I do not do this lightly; but the fragility of his voice and fingerpicking guitar style deserve your attention.
Theo is an album inspired by the birth of De-Sciscio’s first daughter. So what we get is eleven songs, recorded during whatever opportunities he got (thinking back to my own experiences of first becoming a Dad these moments must have been few and far between) and reflecting on what it all means.
It might be easy to scoff at the idea that many of these songs were recorded in first takes, with only one overdub; just him, his voice and an acoustic guitar. Yet it all seems so fresh and intimate, it must have been. It is born out of a homemade experience and yet feels wonderfully accomplished and complete. This is not a record that is made up of scraps.
There’s a number of highlights here – the opening salvo of ‘Two Headed Shadow‘ and ‘Daughter‘ disarm through their tenderness and honesty, right up to the closing ‘For The Poems.’ The lyrical observations are so intimate, it’s as if you are right there. I love the observation about how the hair on his daughter’s head spirals, it’s that intimate.
Sometimes it’s really good to confront your prejudices. I’m so glad I did. This is an album that leaves the listener with a warm, fuzzy glow. A work that shows you can be sincere, without having to ‘wink’ at your audience (particularly a British one) in case there’s too much sincerity and people can’t cope with it unless there’s an unhealthy dollop of irony as a panacea. Start off by taking this at face value and then allow yourself to surrender to its charms, over and over again. In lesser hands, this could have been a totally unlistenable disaster; here it’s something very special, to be played again and again.
