Adventures In Gramophone

Here’s the deal: Snow Patrol have worked with Iain Archer, Iain Archer tours with The Amazing Pilots, The Amazing Pilots produce Duke Special. Which, I hasten to add, is not a spurious attempt on my part to link Peter Wilson to the current head boys in Ulster rock, but merely my way of showing that there’s a loose and creative network currently at play in the North, whose members are, at various levels, producing music of a staggeringly high quality.
If, during one of his many island-wide jaunts, you managed to catch Duke Special, you’d certainly remember him. If his dread-locks and vintage on-stage gramophones didn’t stick in your mind, then his ability to conjure up swooping, emotion-drenched ballads most probably did.
On this, his debut album, Wilson seems determined to force a lump in the listener’s throat. ‘Freewheel’, ‘Kill Me Quickly Please’ and ‘Don’t Breathe’ are all big, shameless, piano-led weepies that avoid mawkishness thanks mainly to his deft way with a melody, and also, helped by the studio nous of Paul ‘Pilot’ Wilkinson, his penchant for nifty production tricks.
Duke Special, you see, wouldn’t be half as special if his songwriting ambition wasn’t matched by a fascination with sonic trickery. His long-held fixation with Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks and by extension The High Llamas is very much to the fore here – and when you consider that these songs were recorded without backing from a label, the attention to detail on view is laudable. Adventures In Gramophone is a record that impresses on any number of levels (e.g by containing, surely, the only song – ‘Some Things Make Your Soul Feel Clean’ – in history that eulogises Connswater) – a quietly ambitious and continually inventive album, it offers up the prospect of this special Duke one day becoming Great.