well considered and very elegantly put together
When you’ve got a minute, just sit down and listen to this. When you’ve come home from work, made the tea, washed the dishes, put the kids to bed, paid the bills, checked your social network pages and are in the mood to just sit down and relax for a minute, put this on. Grab yourself a nice drink, sit in your favourite chair, dim the lights a little bit and press play. They’ve even called the album Houses & Homes so it’ll certainly make you feel at home.
Houses & Homes is totally inoffensive, pleasant alt. country rock, (with a few horns thrown in every now and again). What makes it so relaxing is that it’s not an album made by a bunch of testosterone filled teenagers with their first guitars. The Bye Bye Blackbirds have all passed graduation age, they wear shirts and jumpers and comfortable but tough boots. They even shave regularly. What that means is that this album’s had a little more thought put into it than the type of thing excitable young kids put into it. These songs were probably written at tables containing cups of coffee and broadsheet newspapers as opposed to something scrawled on a notepad in the bogs of some dodgy piss-stained pub bathroom. It’s a mature album, well considered and very elegantly put together. It’s not going to make you want to go out and paint the town red, but it may well make you realise that the living room could do with another layer of emulsion and that’s not a bad thing for a lot of us.
Words: Damian Leslie