Wiki
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Release Date
1 February 2017
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Length
12 tracks
ALBUM NOTES by The Olde Wee Plinth
On his debut outing, Mr Haynes has submitted 10 beautiful songs, magically blended into a full-length album that is immediately wallowable.
Turn off the lights. Find some headphones, give this record to your ever-hungry hifi and give it the attention you deserve. I’ll show you around.
Originally an cheerful acoustic number, Wasted Mouth is expanded here to a four-to-the-floor disco stomper, but with a million backwards pianos floating around each other. Be sure to listen out for the backing vocals on the chorus, recorded during a full-on cold. After a sparkling outro, we are soon into Waiting Here, a beautiful, glittering sun-baked song of longing, as simultaneously 80s as it is contemporary. Electric pianos flicker and electric drums grind below real drums to lay down a sexy, laid-back groove.
Enjoy the pleasure while it lasts though, as the solitary bass drum and distant pianos of Life Looking At Screens soon bring everything back down to earth. Here’s the writer, waking up to the TV, spending eight hours a day in an office, checking texts, checking emails, wondering when all the things that were supposed to enhance life ended up taking it over. You won’t find the answers here. But you will find Brazil, 1970 - a football highlights soundtrack if ever there was one. New Order style bass, a mysterious ambience and no chorus. Possibly the greatest five minutes of your life. So far.
Over a period of about a year, Japanese men were finding envelopes with 10,000 yen inside toilet cubicles. Each envelope came with a hand-written letter urging the receiver to do something useful with the money, and ending the phrase “Please Be Happy”. The writing got shakier throughout that year and then the envelopes suddenly stopped. This song is built around an electric piano loop.
The lusty White Shirt, Pencil Skirt brings you out of the pensive mood to give you naggingly funky bass/acoustic guitar work, which combine with the ambient guitars and electric pianos to create a pulsating sexual tension. But sadly, she loves you and not me. The same, theme, really, as Someday – a song that was blurted out by the writer when he was 16, as a lovesick teenager, and was performed by his most recent band the 45 Rebellion, as a lovesick adult. Here, we have an odder version which here tags seamlessly into its little-known appendage I Like To Party. After the cruel torment of seeing the one he loves with someone else in a club, the writer does the decent thing and gets drunk, heading out of the nightclub with someone else entirely and onto the beach, where the bittersweet ambience of If All Else Fails Tonight takes over.
In City That I Know, the writer laments the condition of his hometown of Derby, once a place that rivalled York in terms of history, now getting rid of any remaining original features in order to compete with other local cities. Note the complete change of musical template around the three-minute mark into a dream-like state. Wake-up Call soon brings you out of that, and pulsates along, caught up in its own lyrical mess, tying up the loose ends of the album as it goes. But then the writer then leaves you there, trapped like all the other characters, as he jumps into his car and drives off into the sunset, away from all the mess. See you in the morning.
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