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Michael Knight
I’m Not Entirely Clear How I Ended Up Like This
Yesboyicecream Records
Article
written by Ged M
May 1, 2008.
Subtitled ‘A Sometime Disjointed Narrative in 11 Tableaux’, the Dublin band led by Richard Murphy attempt to combine classical music and pop to tell everyday stories about dysfunctional relationships. In their Myspace influences, Bacharach follows Beethoven and Nabokov sits alongside Mussorgsky but you could add Stephin Merritt and Neil Hannon to the list to sum up the combination of classic pop notions and scabrous wit presented here. The concept is interesting enough and the presentation is superb - sleeve like a battered paperback, lyric booklet looking half like an opera libretto and half a soap-opera script - but it only works about half the time. ‘Coronation Street’ has a memorably scything guitar riff and ‘And The Party Was My Idea’ has some lovely arrangements but after a while the lyrics become more interesting than the music (a feeling reinforced if you listen to the bonus CD of instrumental versions).
There’s plenty of humour in the words; ‘Reading Old Diary Entries’ starts “November 8: failed to sell those tapes/ nobody likes Menswear anymore’ while ‘Scenes After A Hard Day’s Work’ is the tale of a stalker told in waltz time. Even so, the chronology of the mundane eventually dulls and the way that language is sometimes forced into lyrical structures become strained. It’s literate and sophisticated music that overreaches itself but, then, that’s what ambition does.
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