Graham Reid | | <1 min read
Last Night
Best to be honest. Elsewhere has tried to like albums and performances by Connan Mockasin but has mostly found them frustratingly unfocused to the point of being, as we have said, a kind of ADHD experience.
This eight song, 35 minute album doesn't come with an inviting either: it relates to the “five-part melodrama film” Bostyn'n'Dobsyn which he has made . . . and many soundtracks in the absence of pictures are hard to get a handle on.
Apparently this is meant to be listened to after you've seen the film.
You can find what seems to be a clip from it on You Tube. (It looks cloying and unpromising.)
But this album is hard to dislike because right from the gentle nine minute opener Charlotte's Thong it has a slightly woozy and laidback folk-rock ethos, small touches of exotica and dreamy slo-funk soul.
Even the little snippets of dialogue from the film are short enough to be ignorable, other than on B'n'D where they intrude on the slightly cheesy but nice guitar passages..
Jassbusters is hardly essential and a languid song like Last Night seems to go nowhere very slowly and sounds made up on the spot (as opposed to improvised). But over this short haul the album is at least more consistent and focused musically than his previous albums.
It's Seventies pillow-talk soft-pop and not as clever as it probably thinks it is, but it is also quite charming in a familiar quasi-ambient way.
Easy listening. As ignorable as it is enjoyable.
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