There’s something very appealing about this record and like the first faltering, precocious steps in any creative enterprise, those moments of early revelation are always ones that stick in the mind.
There’s something very appealing about this record and like the first faltering, precocious steps in any creative enterprise, those moments of early revelation are always ones that stick in the mind.
A nice single, one I was inclined to overlook until getting diverted by two gloriously gauche moments on each track. It’s a quiet thing, very much like the things the Beloved put out when they went groovy, or the Bluetones at their most dreamy. Eternal Optimist is a nice pop song with a wistful vocal and clunky chord changes, and a nagging lyric: “You Might Find / You’re on the shelf”. It’s hesitant and a wee bit insipid and should inspire wistful scribblings in day books up and down the land. The main track, By Appointment To, (of which I have two similar mixes) has a gloriously underplayed refrain (the bit when the band sing “And we go down / To the city”), in amongst the hesitant changes in tempo and chord.
There’s something very appealing about this record and like the first faltering, precocious steps in any creative enterprise, those moments of early revelation are always ones that stick in the mind. Precious stuff.