ALBUM REVIEW: The Proclaimers
- Posted on September 17, 2007 11:31 AM
- 0 comments
Life With You
The Proclaimers
(W14 / Universal)
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. ‘Well preserved’ does not even do The Proclaimers justice, as they look identical to the way they looked in the mid-Eighties. One has to wonder what sorcery is afoot in Leith, what ghastly painting lurks in their attic. Are they going on and on like a bewitched hobbit or have they just been ‘spread too thin, like not enough butter over toast’?
As it turns out, just a little bit. Six studio albums in twenty years isn’t prolific by any standards but change is not something the Proclaimers have embraced. If there wasn’t a song about the Iraq war, this album could have been written 20 years ago. It boasts the same arrangements, the same flagrant disregard for scan, rhyme and metre, not to mention the unique and sometimes grating vocal harmonies. There are only so many ways to mute acoustic guitar strings, only so many exuberant songs affirming love one can hear before it all gets to sound, for want of a better word, old. The title track is as original as a new Coldplay single and risks accusations of contrivance.
However, anyone who writes as perfect a pop song as ‘I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)’ deserves a little latitude and taken at face value there is much to commend the songwriting here. They remain lyrically funny, poignant and intelligent at a time when it isn’t cool to be funny, poignant and intelligent (The Long Haul). They criticise misogyny when hating women is the fashion (Here It Comes Again). They reject hypocrisy and self righteousness while their contemporaries accept knighthoods (In Recognition). You can’t help loving anyone who compares a girlfriend’s red dress to ‘blood on the snow’. Perhaps most of all, when so many others only pretend to grow while pushing the same album out every year or so, Craig and Charlie do what they do sparingly while continuing to do it well.
- Matt Killeen
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