The title track which starts The Vatican Cellars album is a deceptively simple folk song; circular, picked guitar, a stripped down drum kit, a double bass and a mournful cello form the basis of the instrumentation while lead singer Simon’s gentle, purely English voice hovers over a tale of “beauty and sadness” with “humour and kindness.” After repeated listens the song begins to sound like a lost classic, breezy and uplifting and a fitting taster of what is to come.
Indeed, this formula is repeated throughout much of the album which proves to be both a good and bad thing. ‘The End of the Line’ is a beautifully sad, lilting song while the vibrato strings in ‘The Wreck of the Alba’ introduce the first hint of drama on the album. ‘My Black Pearl’ sounds like the Pogues if they’d been formed at Jesus College over a glass of wine rather than too much rum.
‘Bitter Plans’ is a late highlight with its wonderfully chaotic contrast between the rhythms of the guitars and drums and the floating vocal line. At times TSCW sounds akin to Coldplay’s Parachutes but with more literate lyrics and a gloomier disposition. By the second half of the album the formula wears a bit thin and one feels that a slight change of tone or pace would do these guys (and gal) a world of good on what is an otherwise well crafted album.
[Originally printed in Oxfordshire Music Scene magazine, issue 11, Winter 2010]
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