(Domino)
The more you listen to Beautiful Thing, the more you realise what a marvel of sequencing it is: here are songs that truly talk to each other, musically and lyrically. You hear it musically in the way the walking bassline of Roll on Blank Tapes rolls into Suspicious of Me, the principal thematic link between two songs that are otherwise very different. You hear it lyrically in the transition from There’s Nothing to Hide into I Feel You. In the former, Taylor assures us gently: “There’s nothing to hide in a song / There’s nothing to know outside this song.” And then, in I Feel You, this most open-hearted and sincere of songwriters offers his truth: “I feel you / I wanted you to know / I feel you … When you’re lonesome / When you’re praying.” It’s not just that there’s nothing to hide; there is no desire to hide.
The production comes from Tim Goldsworthy, and Beautiful Thing sounds fantastic throughout. These are simple songs, but Goldsworthy does enough to keep them from being simplistic. In Roll on Blank Tapes, which may be a reflection on worthless nostalgia (“Home taping is killing music, don’t you know / Skateboarding is not a crime any more”), the song fills with percussive, electronic whooshes, echoes and bangs that seem to reflect the lyric: it sounds oddly like kids skateboarding around the ramps of a deserted multistorey car park. The most fun is Oh Baby, which begins with the glammy hammering piano and synth squiggles of an early Roxy Music single, but has the joyful honesty of a Teenage Fanclub song.
by Michael Hann via Electronic music | The Guardian
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