Music
20 Mar 01

Love Lost

The Last Post, Dublin's newest deputies of the alt-country township, have a strange and beguiling way of making an entire song sound like a chorus: rich, almost unbearably poignant and utterly relentless, and full to capacity with high emotion from the very first bar.

Songs like, particularly, uber-weepie 'Until the Heart Gives Way' are the sound of the moment when you realise you've lost your beloved forever, stretched out - via chorused vocals and a highly overemotional organ - to four heart-wringing minutes.

But, just like at the end of a relationship, there is little sense of progression as one moves through Love Lost, merely the constant revisiting and re-examination of emotional locations already known all too well. Passion and heartbreak are mulled inescapably over and over; song shapes and chord progressions recur again and again in an endless cycle of have-a-good-cry songwriting.

This slow, relentless, smiling-through-the-tears melancholy will please a certain kind of urban cowboy but others might wish for a slightly less predictable, soft-focus, featureless terrain; for something acutely observed, personal, revealing; for some flavour other than bittersweet. Still: sometimes a packet of Sniffs and a bit of a sob are your only man.