Artist : Butcher Boy
Album : Profit In Your Poetry
Label : How Does It Feel To Be Loved?
Genre : Indie
Bitrate : 177 kbps avg
Source : CD (LP)
Playtime : 00:30:35 (40.6MB)
Rls date : 2007-03-13
Store date : 2007-03-05
[Track List]
1. Trouble And Desire 2:34
2. There Is No-One Who Can Tell You Where You've 2:30
Been
3. Profit In Your Poetry 3:09
4. I Could Be In Love With Anyone 3:00
5. I Lost Myself 3:19
6. Girls Make Me Sick 3:22
7. I Know Who You Could Be 2:40
8. Fun 4:21
9. Keep Your Powder Dry 2:16
10.Days Like These Will Be The Death Of Me 3:24
Now here's something interesting, and in what promises to
be another superb year for independent Scottish music,
it's coming at you straight out of Glasgow. The city that
gave the world Belle & Sebastian and Camera Obscura now
has another miserabilist pop ensemble to (dis)content
itself with, and its chief architect John Blain Hunt
proves himself to be a songwriter of enviable skill on
this, Butcher Boy's maiden long player.
It's an album of immense subtlety and depth, the kind of
record you can listen to fifty times and still discover
hidden treasures on that fifty first spin. Being slowly
seduced by an artist is always a joy, and that was very
much the case with this album for this writer.
Not that happiness seems to be an emotion with which Hunt
is particularly au fait, at least not in his songwriting
persona. 'Girls Make Me Sick' is an oblique reference to
the root cause of this discontent - gallows humour, then,
for him to release it as a single 48 hours before the
dawning of Valentine's Day. It's also the song most likely
to draw in new listeners, reminiscent as it is of latter
day B&S, complete with a jaunty boogie piano line.
Delve a little deeper, though, and the more bountiful
treats reveal themselves. The brisk title track, opening
with a sea-shanty guitar riff before stopping altogether
to let Hunt deliver the payoff ('I can see... the profit
in your poetry'), sounds like a fantastic, undiscovered
Smiths composition, but it's to the song containing the
lyrics that open this review I'd like to draw attention.
Here, on 'I Know Who You Could Be', Hunt's ethereal lyrics
skirt around an insistent bass line, casting him as
troubled Glaswegian preacher leading the darkest of
Highland orchestras - rarely has gravitas sounded this
convincing.
If you think Scottish music begins and ends with The View
and The Fratellis, you might want to look elsewhere but
for the rest of us, this is a compelling record
documenting those thousand-odd of shades of grey that
exist between the blacks and whites of life.