25 years ago today: David Kitt released The Big Romance

Originally published in Hot Press in 2001:

On David Kitt's initial recorded offering last year, Small Moments, tender songs are wrapped in a production honed in the bedroom with a guitar and a drum machine. They possess a lo-fi but personal and embryonic feel, so much so that when his brother Robbie guests on one song, you can imagine he just popped in to borrow a football and ended up a spontaneous accomplice.

Though slightly more Sunday best than bedsit casuals, his first album ‘proper’, The Big Romance, thankfully treads the same subtle waters as its predecessor.

Kittser plays almost every instrument on the album (and there are many listed) but treats everything with a sparse respect, so that nothing is overcooked. Important too, because the lyrics are framed around personal small moments, micro visions of things like graffiti’d benches, apartment windows and staring at walls.

With the beautiful opener, and debut single, ‘Song From Hope St.’ we’re taken in a little neighourhood shuffle around an area in Brooklyn, New York, where people walk like “broken beats” and the room you can see them from “feels like an overcoat”. This song is more fleshed out than its original incarnation on 1999's Come On Up To The House compilation, but still retains its beautiful and involving character.

This evocation of moments in time is carried through many of these songs, most specifically on ‘Strange Light In The Evening’, in which a walk by a canal brings you to a bench from which the very names of the lovers carved in it are recited: “Karen loves Alan, and Steyo loves himself”; there’s a subtle Kavanagh nod inherent in it.

‘Pale Blue Light’ begins with a seemingly disjointed drum machine beat until slipping into the melody like a glove. ‘What I Ask’ is simple, and singularly gorgeous each time the chorus slides in.

The scope of the album is such that no two individual preferences among the songs on it are likely to be the same – or for long anyway. That said, take yourself to ‘Step Outside In The Morning Light’, and bask in one of the finest soft summer songs of the year.

For this writer, it conjures a sunny Saturday morning on a balcony in Rathmines, but therein lies the magic. An album free from self-indulgence, The Big Romance improves with each listen.

And that’s the beauty of it.

– Simon Roche

Listen to The Big Romance (Kittser's Version) – a reimagined edition of the album, released back in April – below: