Almost Cured Of Sadness (review)
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Stephen Jones – Almost Cured Of Sadness
If you’re reading this I’m assuming you have an interest in Jones’s previous incarnation as Baby Bird. So I probably don’t need to tell you about those initial solo DIY back room recordings, done on a four track and an arts grant, with their intrinsic DIY charm, wit and songs.
And I don’t need to remind you about Baby Bird #2 (the band) that provided a pop hit in You’re Gorgeous but then lost the golden touch and the plot. And that somewhere amongst all this Mr Jones wrung the neck of the solo Baby Bird project with the instrumentally tedious Dying Happy album, which sounded like a V-signed fuck off commercial suicide note.
What I should tell you is that Almost cured of sadness is Jones once more playing around with multi-tracked vocals and programmed rhythms, albeit with better production values, and it’s some sort of return to form to those early solo recordings. Some humour, odd-ball-ness and hummability, but over 19 tracks ( including ‘interludes’) it can fall foul of the mundane tracking by numbers any old monkey with a computer and a sound card can come up with given enough time and which taxes the collective memory of a herd of elephants to recall even one track.
That’s not to say there isn’t good stuff here – Jesus Freaks and Candy Asses (“Let’s drop a bomb/Get high”) stands out with its funky-drumming, slight jazzy guitar figure and pitch-bending melody, whilst Friend (a forthcoming single) is Jones in false-tto sad sha-la-la ballad mode. But by turns it can be so-so listening.
