Barely a month goes by where there isn’t a fresh call for a moratorium on the earnest singer-songwriter, but still they come with their acoustic guitars, their knitwear and their hurt feelings. The experience of the jaded troubadour is universal enough for new generations to keep falling for such performative soul bearing, which makes it all the harder for that rarest of creatures, a performer with something to say. That’s the conundrum at the heart of Tom Fleming’s post-Wild Beasts project One True Pairing, where songs are delivered with sincerity and contain hard-bitten truths, even if there’s an uncomfortableness and a diffidence in crossing over into territory inhabited by sad lads called James (Blunt, Bay, Arthur and Blake, for starters).
There’s certainly a fair share of emotional offloading on Endless Rain, and with a title like that, how could there not be? Fleming wrote the majority of these songs during a bleak Christmas in Cumbria at the end of 2019, which came off the back of “a terrible breakup, a loss of income, a loss of house, everything. It rained solidly for about a week.” He apparently spent much of his time observing “the brown, mucky water rising and the creatures that live in it.” Consequently, ‘Human Frailty’ has a touch of Nebraska-era Bruce Springsteen about it, while songs called ‘Doubt’ and ‘Midlife Crisis’ signpost the introspective nature of the period that birthed these songs.
Nevertheless, Fleming subverts the genre from the peripheries, going to Hellfire in Dublin under the tutelage of John ‘Spud’ Murphy, helping to bring a wondrous sonic displacement to songs that otherwise might have sounded on the conventional side. The devil is certainly in the detail, with a song like ‘As Fast As I Can Go’ benefiting from what sounds like a panoply of spokes being struck, creating a sense of tension before anvil-like percussion drags us down to the fiery furnaces.
And then there are folk songs like ‘Tunnelling’ and ‘Frozen Food Centre’ that begin with hushed picking before each is developed into a seven-minute sonic adventure of its own magnitude, epic centrepieces for their respective sides of the vinyl. If there’s little more that can be said in song about heartbreak and the human condition coming from a personal perspective, then a widescreen ambitiousness is achieved here with the inclusion of musicians like Lankum’s Cormac MacDiamarda and Percolator’s Eleanor Mylor. The subtlety and the sensitivity involved elevates Endless Rain from introspective fodder to something outward-looking and proud.
