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The follow up to 2005’s ‘Out There’, ‘Checkpoint’ amounts to one giant leap for duo Declan Murray and Amith Narayan. Whereas the debut acted as an interesting if unexceptional introduction to their musical combination of Eastern and Western influences, this time around they offer us more ethnic blues but with the emphasis far more on the quality of songwriting. It’s apparent that in Declan Murray, Tuition, a label who can boast the notable songwriting talents of Roddy Frame, has unearthed another exceptional talent.
The one cover on the album, a faithful version of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Everybody Knows’, might suggest that the rest of album is littered with ironic miserablism but that’s not the case at all. Murray manages to connect the wit of The Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merrit and the wry observational humour of The The’s Matt Johnson, entertaining us with lines such as ‘I’m tired of the chase, take a marathon and squeeze it to a hundred metre race’ and ‘trying not to spill the drinks she bought them to ensure they didn’t walk’. Stylistically the comparisons are cogent too. ‘Reduce It To A Kiss’ has the ring of an Ealing comedy and would sit neatly alongside any one of the ‘69 Love Songs’, while the urban shuffle of ‘Black Hole’ is a dead ringer for a The The tune circa ‘Infected’.
The only weak link to the whole album is ‘Don’t Let It Show’, which is a lo-fi folk dirge containing the bones of a good song but that’s just too long and too under-produced to belong. Other than that, ‘Checkpoint’ is an uplifting collection of refreshingly well-composed songs that prove The Unseen Guest to be as well versed in the Human condition as they are in the geography of the world.
RICHARD STOKOE
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