After whats seems like, and actually has been, months without email/a reliable PC etc I am finally able to post these superb, very different, new reviews of 'Words Falling On The Page' from two different corners of the world. Massive thanks to folks below who took the time to read the sleeve notes, the lyrics and listen to the album properly. Read on MacDuff...
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So as you tell in the liner notes, the recording took place at home, and we all can hear this. I don't go further on the quality, which is good, but no studio quality. So we don't have to quote this on
every track.
Cover
I don't like parents talking 'bout their kids with talent, but this time you are definitely right. As I
think these are some superb shots made by your daughter. They show a grim looking Andy in
sunlight – so I think it's the theme for the record. As you tell – you are not happy with life in
england nowadays, but I'm sure you have a lot of hope – that's the sun. So nice cover, with an
superb photo. Congratulation to your daughter, I would like to make pics on that level :-)
Songs
The Silver Torch
The album starts with a fantastic song. Great chord-structure, lovely melody. You play some
amazing guitar and I am not missing any other instrument. I love the chorus. There are all the notes, that fit the song, but nothing else. So there is space for your own thoughts. Great track!
Picture Postcard (sing but never leave) A critical text here about the new digital world and against rubbish music, composed, recorded and mixed with no passion. I totally agree with this song. The chorus is really beautiful – both text and melody. Great song, which would be perfectly suited by a complete instrumentation.
Wishing & Believing
In this song, the chord-structure characters the whole song perfectly. Grim text that comes from the heart – you can really hear it. It sounds great only with guitars, but I can imagine this as a full instrumented song – drums, bass, guitar, organ/keyboards as well. Listening to it, I can really hear the “other” version, even if it's not existing yet. So I call this your “foot of the mountain”, 'cos it's great in 2 versions – nearly acoustic and complete.
When You Close Your Door
Even if you say, that there's a grim mood again, it is clear, that you're a person with great hope.
Love melody again with a guitar-playing, perfectly fitting the song.
More To Life Than Sorrow
A nice riff, but I wouldn't have played through all the song. So it seems to me like having an idea
for a song, but don't get farther. In my opinion a good demo for a coming song. Sorry for being
honest, but you wanted me to be so ;-). Even the part in the middle, not bad at all, but for me not finished yet.
My Life Over
Great song, sounding a little bit like a Lennon-Demo round about 1965/1966 :-)
I love this song, 'cos the text is perfectly for the father-child relationship. The kids show you the
way to be young again... So this is my own interpretation of this song. Lovely text. And you're right, the feeling of the performance is just great.
You Never Win
Another favourite. I love the nice flowing feeling of the verse. And really flowing the message: you never win. Fantastic. You can see this from two positions. The one is the looser, that always groans: no matter how hard I try, I never win to a fictive third person. Or the winner, that tells the second.... love this song. And the guitar work is admirable... perfect sound for this song.
Picture Postcard (Quality Quills)
A true text, packed into a nice melody. Well, it would have been better to write this complete review with my pen on paper and send it by regular mail... but I'm grateful for not having your postal address ;-)))
But I loke this song, 'cos it's so true. No one's writing cards or letters. Just mails and sms... I really hate this sms-thing... So great song, even if it's not a big thing.... just simple, true and GREAT!!!
Brave New World
Again, as in “you never win”, there's a critical, nearly brutal text with a lovely flowing melody. The text, great and again really true shows that you're thinking 'bout the world around. And you have to be cautious to get the message. It is easy to listen to your songs and say – well, great, lovely... sound really good. But that's not the point. The point here is, that you have something to say. You're looking round and you see, there's something going wrong – just as you tell in the foreword...
Hiding in Sunsets, Trading in Tears
Again a great text with a lot of possibilities to interpret it in my own way. In your annotations you give a hint of what you mean to say... nothing more to this. A lovely performance with a lot of passion in it.
Summary
All in all, this is a fantastic little home-made album. It's hard to compare it to studio-albums, 'cos of the lack of perfect production. But I really love the songs. They show, that you are a intelligent
person, looking round and seeing, that there a many things going wrong nowadays. But you're not going to hide, you tell with a lot of hope, that there is a light at the end of every tunnel... you just have to go in the right direction. As I told in the beginning, it is stupid to talk about the sound, knowing that it was made at home. But one thing... a little bit different guitar-sound would be fantastic. The older songs are great, 'cos the sound was a little different, so it's not going to be a boring sound.... why not trying some acoustic-guitar with pick-ups? But that's my opinion.
Well to be honest. I'm glad I did the download, and I'm glad to have listened to this album. I'm also glad to have contacted you. It would be easier for me to write in german, but that would be no help for you. So I hope you understand my english and there are not too many mistakes in it ;-)
Have a nice day
Peace & Love
Wolfram Jaschke, Germany
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There's a sense in which the common complaint about a lack of authenticity in music misses the point. Pop music can be glorious fun whether or not the artists wrote the songs, played the instruments, or whatever. Anyone who denies this is a lemon-sucking grump. On the other hand, there's a sense in which the complaint hits the point. Fun though pop is, there's something intrinsically valuable about music that articulates a clear artistic vision, a vision that belongs wholly to one person or group.
The complaint is, then, that the modern music industry tends to deprive us of such music by ensuring that every act it promotes appeals as much as possible to the mass mid-market, or to some carefully selected demographic, at the expense of allowing the artist to really express themselves. This tendency explains why it's so refreshing to hear records like Words Falling on the Page. Just from the cover photos, it's apparent that Andy isn't oblivious to his image. But you know that the carefully chosen objects with which he appears have been chosen by because they express something he wants to say, not because they might say something to a target audience. The heartfelt, detailed liner notes make it clear that this record is a deeply personal endeavour. We really are getting one man's music, his take on things he cares about, played and produced just how he wants it to be.
So let's talk about what that vision is. From the notes, you might expect to hear an angry, despairing record. And certainly, the mood isn't positive. But the album strikes me as something both less and more than angry. It's less than angry, in that the mood is more mild; resignation, sadness, futility perhaps. The world, as Andy sees it, is in a pretty bad way, and there's not much to be done about it. There's occasional rays of hope and sunshine, and nostalgia can provide an escape, but all in all, “today it's the brainless, thoughtless and gormless” who run things.
It's more than angry, though, because anger is a simple emotion, and its expression slips over into parody too easily. Instead, Andy spins us a nuanced, complex, fragile web of affect and feeling, one that is much easier to be drawn into and sympathise with than some string of crude fuck-the-world songs. It's understated; an elegy, not a requiem. It's undoubtedly authentic; it's authentically human. We get a genuine portrait of the artist, in the whole and in the round.
Still, authenticity's all very well, but it doesn't matter if the music is rubbish. Thankfully, it's not. Nothing's perfect here; Andy misses notes occasionally, once or twice the recording becomes raw and a little roughshod. But the record, in part, is about the world's imperfections, and it would be incongruous were that theme conveyed by perfectly glossed guitars and faultless vocals. Instead, the record is as accomplished as it needs to be, and no more than it should be. There's a perfect match between the themes and their expression. The melodies and their underscoring are delicate, ethereal, and in a way insubstantial. but several of them stick in your head, repeating as fragments. Again, this matches the mood; the feelings expressed are hard to pin down, evanescent, and yet the overall effect is lasting and engrossing.
The main strength of Andy's songs is his lyrics. He employs a vocabulary that's broader and more expressive than the standard rhyming-dictionary palette, without straying too far in the other direction of ostentation and pretension. He manages to be evocative of both particular times and places, and at the same time of more abstract moods and atmospheres. Rather than try to nail a subject or a feeling with a single line, he lets each song gradually unfold, in a voice that, again, is is surprisingly delicate, vulnerable, tremulous at times.
I've not said anything so far about individual songs, and in a way I don't want to. The moods and themes of the album are expressed by its whole, and singling out one tune or another detracts from the sense of the whole. But the melody of the opening track, The Silver Torch, is a perfect example of those haunting phrases of music that Andy does well. Picture Postcard (Quality Quills) evokes, in the same song, nostalgia, regret, specific sentiments, general ones, and a final twist of hope that maybe, it might be OK after all. Its counterpart, Picture Postcard (Sing But Never Leave) is both a heartfelt complaint and a defiant celebration. You Never Win is perhaps the closest the album comes to simple, outright despair, but it's tempered by the preceding two songs, which express, in a quiet way, thankfulness for what Andy has and hope that there's more good to come.
It would be stupid to exaggerate; this album is not revolutionary. It has antecedents, lyrically, melodically, and thematically, that Andy himself acknowledges. But it is, genuinely, an authentic record, and one that achieves a neat fit of mood, music, and lyric. Finally, perhaps most importantly and impressively, it's a brave and honest record. Andy has given us an eloquent and open picture of how he feels and what he thinks, and the experience of finding out is richly rewarding.
The complaint is, then, that the modern music industry tends to deprive us of such music by ensuring that every act it promotes appeals as much as possible to the mass mid-market, or to some carefully selected demographic, at the expense of allowing the artist to really express themselves. This tendency explains why it's so refreshing to hear records like Words Falling on the Page. Just from the cover photos, it's apparent that Andy isn't oblivious to his image. But you know that the carefully chosen objects with which he appears have been chosen by because they express something he wants to say, not because they might say something to a target audience. The heartfelt, detailed liner notes make it clear that this record is a deeply personal endeavour. We really are getting one man's music, his take on things he cares about, played and produced just how he wants it to be.
So let's talk about what that vision is. From the notes, you might expect to hear an angry, despairing record. And certainly, the mood isn't positive. But the album strikes me as something both less and more than angry. It's less than angry, in that the mood is more mild; resignation, sadness, futility perhaps. The world, as Andy sees it, is in a pretty bad way, and there's not much to be done about it. There's occasional rays of hope and sunshine, and nostalgia can provide an escape, but all in all, “today it's the brainless, thoughtless and gormless” who run things.
It's more than angry, though, because anger is a simple emotion, and its expression slips over into parody too easily. Instead, Andy spins us a nuanced, complex, fragile web of affect and feeling, one that is much easier to be drawn into and sympathise with than some string of crude fuck-the-world songs. It's understated; an elegy, not a requiem. It's undoubtedly authentic; it's authentically human. We get a genuine portrait of the artist, in the whole and in the round.
Still, authenticity's all very well, but it doesn't matter if the music is rubbish. Thankfully, it's not. Nothing's perfect here; Andy misses notes occasionally, once or twice the recording becomes raw and a little roughshod. But the record, in part, is about the world's imperfections, and it would be incongruous were that theme conveyed by perfectly glossed guitars and faultless vocals. Instead, the record is as accomplished as it needs to be, and no more than it should be. There's a perfect match between the themes and their expression. The melodies and their underscoring are delicate, ethereal, and in a way insubstantial. but several of them stick in your head, repeating as fragments. Again, this matches the mood; the feelings expressed are hard to pin down, evanescent, and yet the overall effect is lasting and engrossing.
The main strength of Andy's songs is his lyrics. He employs a vocabulary that's broader and more expressive than the standard rhyming-dictionary palette, without straying too far in the other direction of ostentation and pretension. He manages to be evocative of both particular times and places, and at the same time of more abstract moods and atmospheres. Rather than try to nail a subject or a feeling with a single line, he lets each song gradually unfold, in a voice that, again, is is surprisingly delicate, vulnerable, tremulous at times.
I've not said anything so far about individual songs, and in a way I don't want to. The moods and themes of the album are expressed by its whole, and singling out one tune or another detracts from the sense of the whole. But the melody of the opening track, The Silver Torch, is a perfect example of those haunting phrases of music that Andy does well. Picture Postcard (Quality Quills) evokes, in the same song, nostalgia, regret, specific sentiments, general ones, and a final twist of hope that maybe, it might be OK after all. Its counterpart, Picture Postcard (Sing But Never Leave) is both a heartfelt complaint and a defiant celebration. You Never Win is perhaps the closest the album comes to simple, outright despair, but it's tempered by the preceding two songs, which express, in a quiet way, thankfulness for what Andy has and hope that there's more good to come.
It would be stupid to exaggerate; this album is not revolutionary. It has antecedents, lyrically, melodically, and thematically, that Andy himself acknowledges. But it is, genuinely, an authentic record, and one that achieves a neat fit of mood, music, and lyric. Finally, perhaps most importantly and impressively, it's a brave and honest record. Andy has given us an eloquent and open picture of how he feels and what he thinks, and the experience of finding out is richly rewarding.
Nick Wiltsher, Miami, Florida
