Devon Welsh has been searching for a sound ever since the breakup of Majical Cloudz, and whether it was the tremulous saxophone loops and strings of Dream Songs, the tenuous sparsity of True Love or the punkier outcrops of ‘New York / Realism’ and Click Here Now! each charted course pretty well stood its ground, serving as a canny enough vehicle for his tender baritone.
Matching his delivery, whose stretched vowels and elongated endings help to blur the borders between torch songs and plainspoken word, as a lyricist Welsh trades in a forthright, brusque and sometimes overbearing intimacy while tending to focus on the permeability of our relationships, presence in absence and all of the volatility, scarcity and buoyancy which is encoded in the inevitable process of change. Mundane and self-effacing, beyond the political screeds of Click Here Now! there is not much that happens in Devon Welsh’s songs, which take the form of entreaties to the present moment while subtly marking the passing of days, months or years. And if the sentiments are universal there is still enough specificity and character behind his steely gaze – which more readily these days breaks into a guffaw or a grin – so that when his songs do turn anthemic the gesture at least feels hard-won.
Now after several cycles of bulking and cutting, the veiny troubadour reemerges with a do-it-yourself action adventure, paying homage to both Jimmy Ruffin and The Terminator as he stands over the burning wreckage with clenched fists on the lead single from Come With Me If You Want to Live. Over clattering breakbeats, on ‘That’s What We Needed’ he brings the ruckus with an ode to knotty self-determinacy, and on ‘Best Laid Plans’ he takes the purple powder and crawls down the toilet hole of self-doubt while seeking succour in friendship and the reverberating embrace of his father, the actor Kenneth Welsh who died a couple of years ago at the age of 80, and was addressed with both poignancy and a sense of foreboding on the Dream Songs track ‘Summer’s End’.
