Tag: What Lies Beneath

As per the title, the fourth album by Alan Young under his musical alias digs below the surface of the everyday to find those stories that often go overlooked or unnoticed, those glimpses of humanity and all the quirkiness or mundanity that entails. Produced by Chris Pepper who contributes bass, drums, keys and guitar with violinist David Grubb and his clarinetist partner Anna Perry, Andy Ruddy on guitar and sharing backing vocals with My Girl The River, it aptly opens with ‘Underland’, inspired by and borrowing from the 2019 book by Robert Mcfarlane exploring the world’s underlands in myth, literature, memory and physical existence, giving rise to the album title, as “Time moves slow in the cold damp air/Our heart thumps are the only sound/Our torches sputter and peter out/Far below the human realm”. In keeping with the theme, the track has a suitably droning pagan folk quality.

‘Stunt Double’ comes with violin, woozy keys, bass throbs and staccato drums and is a song about protecting from risk, is dedicated to his brother who lives in Ukraine (“I know we’re just like chalk and cheese/But if there were a way that I could be/Your stunt double…For those moments when you can’t pretend that/You’re not the hero anymore”), while, all hypnotic snake charmer weave and percussive rhythm with a violin bridge by Grubb ‘First Tattoo’ has him contemplating “Will I be too old for my first tattoo?”, wondering if he’ll “Rather have a swallow than a butterfly/Rather have a flower than a dragon’s eye”. I think it’s a safe bet to assume this is metaphorical experience seeking rather than literal.

Circling fingerpicked acoustic, pizzicato strings and steady drumbeat provide the framework for ‘Sunny Day’, a sort of tough love pull yourself together letter to a friend (“I’m not your therapist, I’m not your Mum… There’s more to life than steady rain/And listening to The Jesus and Mary Chain”), offering a helping hand (“If you’re needing to talk, then I’m here to talk”) but not putting up with self-pity (“I want to care, I really do/But there are colours darker than your midnight blue/And out there, it’s a sunny day/Throw back the curtain, I know that you’re uncertain/But let the sunshine bathe your face”). I’m not sure it’s the right approach to possible depression, but it’s certainly a catchy number.

Inspired by a friend who got himself banned from Twitter for hate speech, Perry on pulsing clarinet and with a deliberate medieval court jester folksy flavour, ‘Cancel Me’ addresses cancel culture and the knee jerk reaction taken across the political and generational spectrum in refusing to listen to different points of views (“Just because you know you’re right doesn’t mean that I am wrong/You treat me like the enemy, finding evil in all I say/But if we agree on the rising seas, why do we have to fight this way?”) making the sharp point that “What used to be called telling lies is now doing your own research” and how “freedom has been repossessed/By those who know that they are right, and simply say to hell with the rest”.

A very brief instrumental reprise of ‘Underlands’ coming halfway, it continues with ‘Dusk On The 33’, a melancholic a song which, based on (and opening and closing with songwriter friend Xenia singing a snatch) the Georgian lullaby Iavnana, tells of a woman who rides the buses all day to keep warm because she can’t afford heating and is at heart about how people, and especially women of a certain age, somehow become invisible when seeing them is too inconvenient (“A young mother struggles alone with her folding chair/The windows mist up as the shoppers ignore that she’s there”).

There’s a similar theme to the piano-based, atmospherically hollow ‘Veneer’ in which a piece of ageing furniture personifies the human condition (“With time and change in temperature/Cracks started to appear/I needed some attention/A little bit of care…it seems I’m just veneer/Cheap wood on the inside”) and which finds love and contentment with a dancing figurine placed on its shelf (“An echo of my dreams/No more a solid citizen/I’m happy in my skin/With all my imperfections/I can let you in”).

Rather belatedly, Young has finally written a song that explains the musical identity under which he trades, as, opening with a ticking clock, on the psychedelic tinged ‘Serious Child’ he sings “People say don’t sweat about the small stuff/But If I stop to think about the big stuff/Mum said, you’ve always been a little worrier, worrier/Something gets you and it won’t let go…You don’t say much but there’s something on your mind/Don’t know why you need to be so quiet and mysterious”.

There’s a wry line of mordant wit to the Iberian sway of ‘Charming’ (“Somewhere there’s a rabbit without its foot/Because you’re charming”), a song about those who think they can get away with anything because everyone swoons over them (“You charm the finches from the trees/You charm your lovers to their knees/Charm old milk into a cheese”) without realising their vampiric, manipulative nature (“You broke into the deepest vault/Talked murder down to common assault/Pretended it was no-one’s fault/You charm the locks to not need keys/You charm the ducks to think they’re geese/Charm a prude into striptease”).

Wrapped in sadness. ‘Remnant’ returns to the notion of becoming invisible as you get older (“What in the hell do you think you’re doing?/Treating me like I’m not even here…I’ve not really spoken in ages/No one’s been around for weeks/There’s only so much you can say to the postman”) as the narrator asks “When did I become obsolete…A ghost in a fax machine/Analogue when the world is digital/A remnant of what has been”, those they love not just becoming confused memories, just figures in a faded photograph.

Perhaps inevitably, the title and sentiment recalling the Simon & Garfunkel phrase in ‘Old Friends’, ‘Book Ends’ ends things with death (“Baked the day she suddenly dropped dead/We chew it slowly that last apple pie”) and that numbing loneliness of old age, communication shut down (“We never could talk much, and now don’t try…hog that grate, say nothing, sit, sleep, stare”) with only “our silence made us seem a pair” and the heartbreaking final lines of “Your life’s all shattered into smithereens/Back in our silences and sullen looks/for all the Scotch we drink, what’s still between’s/not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books”.

If, as Mcfarlane holds, the Anthropocene is “an epoch of loss – of species, places and people – for which we are speaking a language of grief and, even harder to find, a language of hope”, then perhaps this is its soundtrack.

Mike Davies

Artist’s website: www.seriouschild.com

‘First Tattoo’ – official video: