Name: Iain Archer
Release: To The Pine Roots
Label: Black Records
Year: 2009
Rating: 3/5
The question is not “What is Iain Archer’s album like?” The question, instead, should be “Is Iain Archer’s music more like that of Damien Rice or Simon and Garfunkel?” It’s something you can ponder for ages. It’s a single vocal line, so it doesn’t have the whole basic dual harmony thing that Simon and Garfunkel were so famous for, but on the other hand Archer’s voice is so gentle and almost timid in a contrived way that it’s reminiscent of Simon and Garfunkel’s just-above-a-whisper trademark. The songs have very Damien Rice-style names – ‘The Acrobat’, ‘The Nightwatchman’, ‘Streamer on a Kite’ – things of that ilk – but then maybe the same could be said of S&G, what with ‘The Boxer’ and everything. Oooh, it’s hard to choose. Some arts degree student could string a whole thesis out of that, if they’d had enough to drink.
So it’s best to set that aside and look at the music itself. It’s very gentle and rolling-along type stuff, the equivalent of carrying the listener along in a boat across a lake with a very slight breeze rippling the water. Very pleasant, very dreamy, just a little soporific. At the risk of sounding cynical, though, it could also be described as a bit… wet? To continue the lake theme, anyway. Nice background music, maybe, but not really enough passion there to excite anything more than “Yes, very nice” as a response.
– Sophie Carville
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