Folk

To put it bluntly, some ideas work much better in theory than in practice.

Take Howie B’s inspiration for his new song, ‘Tap Dancer’. In theory, the track stems from the “concept of a symbolic dance/fight between Scottish workers.” In practice, it’s merely two people (Howie and collaborator Jon Hassell) bashing drumsticks against their microphones. It sounds like… pretty much what you’d expect.

This is the basic problem with Howie’s fourth record, Folk: digital flourishes, electronic noodlings and fragmented vocals fill up ten tracks with lashings of style/ ‘ideas’ but precious little substance. Actual tunes seem to be an additional extra which Howie and his partners-in-crime have decided to forgo.

The one, beautiful exception comes when Howie takes two already existing songs – David Essex’s ‘Rock On’ and Babs & Ernie’s ‘Satisfied’ – and blends them together to create ‘Duet’. Gavin Friday and Karmen Wiyjnberg play separate melody lines off against one another, until the momentum rises and their voices gorgeously coalesce.

The other highlights are only momentary. ‘Making Love On Your Side’, ‘Musical Mayday’ and ‘All This Means To Me’ each contain short bursts of striking panache, but none stand alone as great tracks.

For all the grand ideas, the quality of the artist’s previous material far surpasses that of this record. On his vocal debut ‘Watermelon Sugar’, Howie repeats several times that he’s “looking for something to say”. Let’s hope he finds it soon.

Pallid.