Review of Strict Joy Album by The Swell Season

Review of The Swell Season's album Strict Joy

The Swell Season Strict Joy Album

We didn't start off on the best of terms, me and Swell Season, or to describe it absolutely correctly me and their second album Strict Joy. To start with, I spent most of that key, virgin listen stuck in a seemingly endless traffic jam somewhere near Hatfield, all the while trying unsuccessfully to contain the onset of road rage. And as well as being tormented by the sight of multiple Range Rover drivers not giving a toss, to my less than receptive ears the first two songs - Low Rising and Feeling The Pull - both had that kind of scratchy, Cherry Ghost-style delivery, leaving me thinking something along the lines of 'That's just what we need, more bloody lecturer rock'.

But thankfully trips down south are a rarity for me most weeks, and I'm pleased to report that in fact as those Hoxton PR types would probably describe it, Strict Joy is a record which after repeated listens 'Grabs a lot of headspace'. Put more simply, it's an old fashioned grower.

A semi-permanent collaboration between Frames Glenn Hansard and Czech singer/pianist Marketa Irglova, you may have missed Swell Season so far. You or a friend however probably caught 2007's independent hit film Once, of which the signature tune Falling Slowly, as performed by the duo, won an Oscar for Best Original Song.

Their first release since that accolade, Strict Joy is a record which has qualities both obvious and discrete. As much as your Media Studies teacher might like the erudite nature of Hansard's pebbles-on-tin voice, fourty-eight minutes of listening to just him and a guitar would surely border on masochism. Good job for the rest of us then that Irglova has a gloriously velvet delivery of her own, one which constitutes a refreshing outbreak of understatement best revealed when she steps into the foreground on Fantasy Man and the melancholy I Have Loved You Wrong.

As well as trading vocal duties, significantly there's also an additional more uptempo gear to complement the folky/torch song dimension. Whilst it wouldn't be true to describe The Rain and the show-stealing High Horses as out of keeping, both offer more than austerity, whilst elsewhere
Love That Conquers has at least a tangential resemblance to the close harmonies of bygone oldies Crosby, Stills & Nash.

Much of the record's content leaves unsubtle clues to the nature of the duo's ongoing relationship, an on-off romance in which the plot of Falling Slowly became life, only for it to subsequently implode. Hansard has been quoted as explaining that Strict Joy's lyrics could be recognised by outsiders as a diary, a statement rendered far more powerful by words he utters, such as The Verb's plaintive 'I'm stuck here killing myself, you're out there drinking somewhere'. At times it's almost too painful to listen, but it's testament to their skill as songwriters that the whole exercise remains poignant and not voyeuristic. Who knows what just good friends will bring.


Andy Peterson


Site - http://www.theswellseason.com

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