Scrap your DeLoreans, the new Alistair Griffin album Albion Sky has been released in our lifetime* on Dramatico Entertainment!
This is a monumental occurrence which would only be surpassed if Roseberry Topping were to suddenly sprout a Vesuvius-like lava flow, as it’s been coming soon or soonish or in March or August for at least the last five or six years.
Last August, it even had a sort of subliminal release on a Griffin own-label, with an Asda Smartprice promotional campaign of radio and gigs and interviews about lemon curd but no actual real-life album turning up at the end of it, or even any curd. Sort of like Christmas without Santa Claus.
Albion Sky when it’s not at a fancy dress party
So by now enthusiasm was somewhere near the level of the contents of a can of Red Bull being shared by six insomniacs. But for one of my favourite singers I dredged up what was left of mine despite the puzzlingly low-key promotion and ordered a CD. No gigs, no radio tour and even his website sat neglected without a mention that the album was now OUT, let alone a picture and a button to click to part with dosh. Had it really been released this time?
The album turned up in the post, so it wasn’t a wind-up. Second surprise was there was no surprise as only two of the songs were new, most having been available to buy, download or stream already. As for the songs that had made the cut, I felt better ones were missing and even Is It Me, the best track on Griffin’s EP #Mogganaut, had been relegated to the dross heap by its exclusion.
But music is personal and subjective – and frustrating it turns out when you like it enough to care about it.
I manage to bribe a couple of friends to listen with copious cake, no mean feat as they’re into bands so it’s quite hard to drum up enthusiasm for gigs and stuff once you say ‘Alistair Griffin’. Sometimes making up an imaginary band name helps, but I forgot to pretend so they have that ‘fame academy singer’ look before I can even glance at the play button.
I have my trainers on so get to it faster than Usain Bolt in a Bugatti Veyron Super Sport, then turn up the volume as the kazoos announce the beginning of Blinding Lights. This sounded cracking played live at the O2 Academy gig last year. It’s a very upbeat, if poppy, song, brimming over with synths, oh-o-oh-o’s and guitars, although sadly the catchy picked-out guitar line that drove the demo version didn’t make it. Memorial service coming soon.
My friends are impressed, right up to the very end.
“Why did he fade it out?” one asks. “It’s like on supermarket music or something” and promptly wanders off to see if there is any better cake in the kitchen.
“Hmm,” I say. “It’s probably faded out because he forgot about recording an ending for it and then thought sod it, at least if there’s no ending no-one can complain they don’t like the ending.”
Fact: The Albion Sky CD smells of lemons when you scratch it (this is not a fact)
By this time a song about driving called Just Drive is blasting from the speakers and Friend No.1 is still hiding in the kitchen. This song was written to back the BBC’s Formula One end of season video montage in 2010. It caught the imagination of many F1 fans by getting inextricably intertwined emotionally with said video imagery and the passion they feel for F1. Sky F1 have since adapted it to use as their theme tune to try to get their own back on the BBC for having 4 million more viewers than them.
The re-worked Sky track has much edgier guitar, more energy and excitement and I prefer it, right up until the choir comes in. On the album it’s the original version with a wonderful helping of cheesestrings, an insubstantial lyric and a startlingly dominant ‘white noise’ synth effect that makes the whole thing sound, er, just noisy. Just Drive worked brilliantly for its intended purpose, it doesn’t work as well as a stand-alone song unless you’re into the sort of music that ‘West That’ were very popular for and we’re not. But lots of people are.
I drag Friend No.1 out of the kitchen because Save This Day is the best track that actually made it onto the album and must surely be in the running for next single, assuming Is It Me is out. It has a much grittier, edgier treatment, with pounding drums driving the momentum and energy. It is in another class compared with the previous track.
“I love the way his northern accent shows up, do you?” comments Friend No.1 with a big smile.
“Yes, it’s great,” I respond, although I don’t really notice it as I have one myself.
We all like Save This Day a lot which is good as I’m beginning to wish I’d given the kitchen another once over as it’s getting a lot more attention than I’d bargained for.
Next up is the first of the two new songs, Always No. 1.
“It sounds like another montage song,” pipes up Friend No.1 and promptly starts noisily opening crisp bags and flicking through my CD collection.
Although not a single-sort-of-song like the previous one, I like the chorus, so I wrestle the crisps away so we can hear and don’t mention that it’d been written to pitch for a BBC F1 video, with the lyric indicating a reliance on Michael Schumacher either winning or retiring, neither of which he obliged with. Instead, Wimbledon stuck it somewhat inappropriately on an Andy Murray montage.
I’m astonished no-one suggested to Alistair that he do an EP of montage songs as he seems to be so good at them, to save putting them on the actual album leaving room for better songs that have gone AWOL. He could have called it something catchy like ‘I am King Monty of Montage’ or ‘Maniacal Montage Mayhem’. He could even have included a hash symbol, or something original and withit like that.
Next is Albion Sky, bizarrely named after the album. The singer is busy telling us he has ‘Nothing in my pocket, living but I’ve already died’ which is nice, but my favourite line is the melancholy ‘To be free, but never free from the ghosts that walk inside of me’. There’s a merry-go-round as well, although sadly the lyricist chickened out and didn’t make it to the bumper cars. I suppose he’d no change, his pockets being empty and all.
I heard this sung live at The Bedford once with a completely stunning vocal that made the song come to life and shine. That specialness the vocalist can find when you hear him live seems to be hard for the recording process to capture onto little plastic discs and this song really needs it.
It’s a nice enough song but I throw into the conversation that I’m not sure the increasingly noise-ridden layered synth track in the latter half really suits it and that this approach on this particular song is a bit of a surprise given Griffin’s predilection for ‘nice’ sounding tracks with strings galore, (of the catgut, not the lunchbox, variety).
This admission gets me a ‘look’ from Friend No.2.
“You keep saying you don’t like pretty sounding tracks and strings and now you want them?” she sighs.
“Maybe it’d suit this song and this lyric,” I reply sheepishly, “the synth is growing on me though!”
If he says “cheese” one more time I’ll…
Albion Sky gets a thumb’s up from Friend No.2 who decides it’s “good” and probably from me once I’ve listened a bit more. Friend No.1, having been deprived of crisps, is gazing out the window admiring the helter skelter in the garden.
We drop our cake when the second of the new songs starts as Chemistry is an upbeat, very poppy, bouncy sounding song that we have to pogo along to, although we’re all more into space hoppers really.
I’d heard it before at aforementioned gig where I’d liked it a lot and it’s ended up being one of the better tracks on the album, nicely produced with a very youthful sound to it. Although very cheerily sung, it starts from a troubled place as do many of these songs if you look into them far enough.
Next is one of the darker songs on the album and it causes some debate. High is a very good song but has an overtly druggy theme making it hard to like. Although many of our favourite songs are drug-related, there is little obliqueness here with the singer blithely telling us all how high he is and how addicted whilst hallucinating about ‘speeding’ cars and angels who seem to be undergoing a firearms training course complete with learning manual.
We play it again a couple of times to get a better understanding. It’s a deeply sad lyric with an unclear outcome, we decide, although “not cool” is bandied about a bit as well. ‘This chemical life I’m leaving behind is all I want’ sings the singer. The track is rousingly energetic and guitar-laden and thankfully Chester Cheesestring kept his grubby yellow mitts off this one. Theme aside, one of my favourites.
Jungle drums herald the arrival of Willow Girl, not a song about a female Pinocchio but a girl from a Chinese restaurant in York. Before the album, I’d only heard an overly-sweet acoustic version, which I liked about as much as cold porridge on toast.
Luckily, many superheroes in tights banded together and rescued the girl from where she was stuck fast to the sticky floor in The Willow. Not really, because there’s never a superhero around when you need one, but a mere mortal in a black mac and wellies stepped in and staged a rescue with the arrangement of the band track which is energetic and totally rocking seeing as my powers of description have failed me. Should have put my Superman cloak on.
None of us are in the kitchen for this one and although it’s not the best vocal we’ve heard (or it could be an un-needed ‘effect’) we make “good track” noises, right up to the last few seconds when Friend No.2 says casually, “That talky thing’s a bit odd.”
“He’s just not very good at endings,” I reply somewhat desperately. “I don’t think he’s got a long enough attention span.” I’d prefer it without, but given the sound of the song overall, I think it kind of works.
All These Dreams is a great song which appeared a while ago on a promotional video with a clip of one of the most stunning sounding tracks I’ve heard. I would pay every penny I have (32p) for a copy with the original guitar track, as sadly this version doesn’t have it. It’s a very nice track, but the other sounded like it could have been so perfect it’s hard to figure why the artist thought it didn’t suit the lyric and left us with this one.
Friend No.2 spots something.
“Sounds like it’s about to grind to a halt and he’s slurring it, has he had a few do you think?”
“Blimey, I have no idea, he’s always sung a bit slurry here and there,” I countered. “I think it’s so he can laugh at us when we sing along with the wrong words.”
In a perfectly normal non-perfect way he’s always done this during his live gigs, but it’s a bit more noticeable here unfortunately. And a big handle soon sorts the other problem out, once I wound it up a tiny bit it became one of my favourites! This is the song that had a hand in inspiring the name of my blog, ‘I Heard A Ghost’ if you were wondering how I came up with that!
Oh flip, is that a hickey? It’ll show in me photies…
Talking of singing, and we are, because this be music, the next track When God Was A Boy sends Friend No.1 back to the kitchen.
“He’s singing it with like a put on sulky little boy voice,” she complains.
“Maybe he feels he has to mix it up a bit to be interesting,” I suggest unconvincingly.
Secretly I’m wishing he’d just sung it in his ‘normal’ voice, which would’ve been far more interesting as it’d be a very beautiful song then.
The melody is lovely with stunning guitar and a simplicity that grabs every vestige of your attention. It deserves the sort of vocal loveliness we are used to hearing from Mr Griffin but that had obviously been left at home, possibly with his keys and his phone. This is a song crying out for a makeover and a single release when the keys and phone turn up and I shout through to my friend to have a look round in the kitchen for them just in case.
Next up is another dark song, Silent Suicide. It’s a very powerful song that puts me right back in the middle of emotions I feel from a sad time of my own. I love this song, it’s Griffin’s best song and it’s also my biggest disappointment of the album…
Although the lyric has been de-personalised at the start from earlier versions, the power and emotion is still inherent. It’s a very good vocal indeed and the lyric’s desperate-despair is so tangible you can reach out and grab it, but there’s a smidgen of hope too that was introduced when the original ‘this is my silent suicide’ was changed to ‘this was‘.
The track, though, has had the spiky energy and momentum of the demo and live versions, which rose and rose on a crescendo of heartfelt feeling, sapped from it and turned into a laid-back, nice thing which fights with the emotions of the lyric and causes the song to lose its intensity.
This song has also been blessed with the strangest production oddity of the whole album. We’re all caught up in the moment and reaching surreptitiously for the Kleenex when Griffin kills the mood with a very peculiar speak-shouting megaphone thing, perhaps in an attempt to emphasise ‘trying to shout for help non-verbally but no-one is hearing’. It sounds cringey.
This is a potentially outstanding song desperately in need of an alternative version, perhaps this is what Griffin was speak-shouting about in the vain hope that the Producer would hear him and see reason. Unusually for Griffin fans, many spoke up on his Facebook about not liking this version and particularly the shouting part when it surfaced on a video a couple of years ago. It’s a shame they were ignored.
My friends are not as close to the song and although they say the end is “Pretty awful,” they know by now that “He doesn’t do endings, does he?”
We all need picking up with something cheery, but the album is winding down now so I hand out the smartie cookies in an attempt to lighten the mood as we sit down to concentrate on the final track. I Have Lived wins the tin of fruit cocktail as it has the dubious distinction of being the only song on the album — and quite possibly in Griffin’s entire catalogue — that’s not full of light, stars, suns and other cosmic references that deeply litter the Griffin lyrical psyche.
It is one of the better produced songs with a low-key acoustic sounding track which builds nicely with the song suiting it well and Griffin has managed to restrict to a minimum his tendency when singing it live to shout when he’s trying to sound passionate in the latter part. We like this one and although the very small mother is a bit deaf by the end, I’m sure she’ll be fine eventually…
So, much cake has been eaten, the kitchen inspected and the verdict is in.
This album has a giant variety pack of musical styles on it, so not everyone will like all of it. But it’s easy to connect with these songs, which helps. Variety is good but there have to be enough songs with a sound you like. If I’d only ever heard Just Drive I doubt I would have picked up the album, but if you delve deeper there are grittier songs and if you like poppy songs too, you will love this album.
I ask my friends what they think of Albion Sky and both say they like about half, but not necessarily the same half.
“I’ll definitely buy it though,” promises one.
“Me too,” says the other.
To be on the safe side, I make a vague threat about there being no more cake until they do, so they borrow Mr Bolt’s car to get onto Amazon pronto but crash into the coffee table and the repair bill maxes out their credit cards.
Ah well…
Buy the Albion Sky CD from Amazon and shops or download from iTunes and Amazon here
*Albion Sky was released on 2 July 2012
I heard a ghost 
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