BEGINNING WITH SWIRLING FUNFAIR ORGAN AND PACY SWINGING BRASS, SWEET REFRAINS (THE FIRST ALBUM FROM THE PAUL HEATONLESS NEW INCARNATION OF THE BEAUTIFUL SOUTH, RELEASED NEXT WEEK) SETS OFF WITH CAP AT FAMILIARLY JAUNTY ANGLE – MUSICALLY, AT LEAST.
The opening of SECOND COMING, “Here we go again…”, plays as a slightly weary start for now lone male vocalist Dave Hemingway – the singer of The Beautiful South’s only UK number one single, A LITTLE TIME.
But, once reacquainted with The South’s dry and trenchant humour across the twelve tracks of this release, it’s clear that he’s having as much fun as at any point previously.
DEVIL IN MY WINE is a gorgeously self-pitying hangover ballad, IF I LAUGH appears to be written from the point of view of a nightclub bouncer trying to avoid trouble, while single STICK IT IN AND TURN IT is another in the group’s long line of beered-up and bittersweet relationship songs. It’s what T-Rex might have sounded like had they been the wedding band for the love-hate couple in question, the classic mid-paced piano trills and male-female spat vocals bolstered by an addictive punch-up guitar riff and pounding drums.
There are no great revelations here, nothing that suggests a complete overhaul of the mechanics of music-making for the Hull-based band, but a sonic revolution was never their raison d’être. “Life’s too short to take a long-shot,” sings Hemingway on THE ENTERTAINER, and “I’m a girl… …in a lowbrow band,” sings female vocalist Ali Wheeler on MOMENT OF MADNESS, both misleadingly suggesting wilful underachievement all round. The South’s gentle conservatism of sound was always something of a Trojan horse, their only-just-left-of-the-mainstream country-tinged soul-pop giving them safe passage into the homes of millions whereupon sharpened knifelike bons mots were unsheathed.
More often than not, here, they are once again stuck in and turned.