Sam Duckworth’s unusual blend of folk balladry, laptop beats and precociously post-modern lyrics made his album ‘The Chronicles of a Bohemian Teenager’ one of the critical favourites of last year.
Like his professed musical idol, the indefatigable agit-prop troubadour Billy Bragg, he’s shown himself to be a fiercely outspoken and committed political activist.
Sadly none of this is apparent in ‘I Spy’, a stillborn and ponderously navel-gazing examination of the nature of songcraft. ‘This song is a simple tune’, he insists. ‘The beats are not complex / I’m just trying to make you sing and not be perplexed.’
I’m not perplexed, I’m bored. Elaborate musical meta-commentaries on the relationship between artist and audience are the sort of thing that should have died out with Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’.
Where’s the Bragg-inspired social comment, the political tub-thumping, the searing dissection of 21st-century mores? There’s nothing here but excruciatingly self-referential preciousness – hey, the chorus even gets you to sing along to a lyric that asks, ‘Why are you singing out?’. See what he did there?
You may momentarily admire the guy’s cleverness but it doesn’t make this tune any less of a painfully leaden academic exercise. He’s got a long way to go before inheriting Billy’s crown. For more information you can visit: http://www.getcapewearcapefly.com
