Flak Magazine: Review of Tompaulin's The Town and the City, 2-25-02

Forming blanket assumptions about musicians based on a few biographical facts is hardly fair, but it's often a deadly accurate, fun way to pass the time and shed some light on a few musical stereotypes.

For instance, there's plenty to deduce about Tompaulin's modus operandi from the following clues: Tompaulin is a six-piece British rock band with a male vocalist and a female vocalist. The group is named after a poet, Tom Paulin. Accompanying each of its releases is a brief bit of creative writing in the form of a narrative. The band has songs called "All the Great Writers and Me" and "The Boy Hairdresser." A handful of lyrics are sung in French. Guest musicians contribute trumpet, viola, cello, clarinet and flute on the band's debut album, The Town and the City. The liner notes from that album thank Bob Dylan, Young Marble Giants and Brian Wilson, "for making every day like summer."

By this point, you probably don't need to be told that NME called Tompaulin the first post-Belle and Sebastian band, and you're probably wondering why the group fronted by Jamie Holman and Stacey McKenna is worth of any ink, or pixels, at all.

But if you happen to have a passing familiarity with Belle and Sebastian, you know it's because B&S has been flopping around in fey irrelevancy ever since The Boy With the Arab Strap. Once a band's released three albums, it's expected it will grow and mature, evolving to avoid the pitfalls of sounding one-note. B&S frontman Stewart Murdoch has done this by farming out songwriting duties to the group's lesser lights, with disastrous results. What's more, Murdoch, who penned such lovely songs as "The State I'm In," "Judy and the Dream of Horses" and "The Rollercoaster Ride" has failed to grow as a songwriter and after three, let alone four, albums of similar-sounding songs, quality can only carry him so far. And the numerous B&S side projects have not panned out in the least.

And while you wouldn't expect The Monkees to usurp The Beatles or Christina Aguilera to outdiva Britney, Tompaulin's low-profile run of four shimmering singles and a surprisingly mature debut album has put the group in a position to capture the coveted Hello Kitty-courier-bag demographic.

The Town in the City does its part to distance the group from such B&S comparisons with the '60s groove of "My Life at the Movies," the group's fourth single. An homage to days spent in the cinema, the song is propelled by snappy lyrics, driving electric piano, bursts of trumpet and McKenna's powerful, dynamic vocals. The song's chorus is a bit of witty call-and-response ("I could forgive anything. ... Straight to video? Anything.") that deftly toes the line between cute and too cute.

Another of four McKenna-sung numbers, "Daydreaming," throws down the twee-pop gauntlet, opening up seemingly in mid-note with a trumpet and viola. McKenna's voice is at its strongest as she spins a first-person narrative about being the plaything of a rich married man. McKenna leads off with "You pick me up at 10/ in your Mercedes-Benz," before singing a few lines later, "As we slide up the drive/ I'll pretend that it's all mine/ Make believe I'm here all the time." At first blush, the song's about a working girl's dreams of taking the relationship a step further before McKenna turns the song on its head with chorus, "And then the foreman shouts at me, 'Stop daydreaming and do those things.'" Breathy pop songs are rarely this nuanced.

As for the eight songs sung by Holman, they're largely hit and miss. Heavily indebted to the same grooves as "My Life at the Movies," "Richard Brautigan" is a worthy second track with perhaps the album's best melody. Lyrically, though, the song is the album's weak point, telling of "The poetry wars of 1984," which involves "smuggling nouns in to London town, so I could finish the verse." What probably sounded good on paper ends up coming across as cheeky and played-out on record.

Holman more than makes up for this, however, on "The Boy Hairdresser," a swooning, string-driven ballad about a guy who "still comes here/ To set your hair and whisper/ 'You haven't aged a year.'" Melodramatic in the best possible way, the sprawling, rhythm-sectionless song features the album's most endearing lyric, "How did those days turn into these days?"

Equally praiseworthy is "Partisan," a quasi-political tip of the hat to Leonard Cohen about how the romance of being a revolutionary gives way to confusion, chaos and needless sacrifice.

Clearly, Holman is a frontman of no small talents, which makes his missteps more evident. On a few tracks, Holman's vocals and the album's music flirt with irrelevance or, worse, annoyance. "Kicking and Punching" is a cheery tune with a drum-machine beat that's way too similar to the cute-rock labels like K and Sarah Records were peddling back in the late '80s and early '90s. No one needs to hear this stuff again, and even though Holman's lyrics about getting his head kicked in for kissing a musclehead's "fat girlfriend" marry up oddly with the lightweight melody, the song's cuteness is too much to overcome. In a similar vein, Holman's overly wimpy vocals on "The Good Doctor" and "On the Buses" turn truly memorable songs into merely good ones.

Nonetheless, for a debut album, The Town in the City is amazingly self-assured, confident and among the best releases of 2001. If only it can overcome atrocious distribution, the band might have the satisfaction of having some sales to along with great press.

Note: The album has been hard to track down in a lot of US record stores, and some of them have been trying to get a copy for months. You can order it from Norman Records in Leeds, UK. They take credit cards, and they're great people. It's not really Flak style to promote one retailer over the others, so in general, anyone seeking this album probably will have better luck buying it directly from such UK retailers as Norman, the Rough Trade Shop, Amazon U.K. or Opal Music.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)