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| Photo Credit - Press Counsel PR |
The latest offering from Winchester’s own Frank Turner, Tape
Deck Heart is not an album that will change the world or change the opinion of
his critics. What it is though is a solid collection of songs that show
Turner’s maturing as a lyricist and ear for a tune that began to show itself
more clearly on previous effort, England Keep My Bones.
Although many of Turner’s songs could be seen as personal,
(Ballad of Me and All My Friends, Substitute), the subject matter that makes up
the bulk of Tape Deck Heart is much more introspective, dissecting a messy
breakup piece by piece in a very detailed way with much more personal
information than you’d expect from most artists these days. If you’re not a fan
of Turner’s storytelling style and arguably populist themes then this is
unlikely to convert you. Album opener Recovery starts with just Turner and an
acoustic guitar before breaking into a rip roaring statement of intent, an
optimistic start to an album which deals at times with themes that obviously
mean a lot to Turner and would resonate with many in his situation.
The lyrical content of Tape Deck Heart is a departure from
the thematic approach that Turner took on England Keep My Bones. That album was
seen as a love letter to England with tracks like Rivers expunging all of
Turner’s clearly heartfelt love for the country he calls home, despite the
amount of touring the career he has chosen requires of him. Turner noted in an
interview with Asia Life Magazine that “this record isn’t about England at all
— I did that last time round. This album is about self-examination, running
through your own faults, about change, and about ending. Something like that.”
If Tape Deck Heart is about faults then Tell Tale Signs is
its anthem, starting as it means to go on actually naming the woman who caused
Turner to feel this way (“God damnit Amy.”) and talking frankly – no pun
intended – about the ins and outs of the relationship and its breakdown, it’s a
subject that has been touched on before by Turner on previous albums but if
you’ve followed his career closely it is most interesting to compare this
attitude to songs from a seemingly happier time when Turner was a lot less
cynical about relationships and their effect. To Take You Home from 2008s Love
Ire & Song showed the wide eyed wonder of a blossoming love whereas Tape
Deck Heart is closer to a broken heart album. In an interview on Dance Yrself
Clean (their spelling, not mine) Turner describes the album as having “a lot of
stuff on this record about loss and failure in relationships, about what
happens when something that was supposed to be timeless runs out of time.”
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| Photo Credit - Brantley Gutierrez |
Turner does offer some hope for this seemingly hopeless
situation and songs like Four Simple Words and the current radio hit Recovery
are songs built for Turner’s true home, the festivals and the gig circuit. Like
I Still Believe from his previous album, Four Simple Words is built around a
simple refrain (“I want to dance”) which is perfectly pitched to get a crowd
going in the style of the traditional sing-a-long. This isn’t to say that it is
the best song on the album by any stretch, for my money – and it was my money
that bought it – the best formed song is The Fisher King Blues, arguably the
least directly personal track on the album. Despite the name check for
Battersea power station, the song has its heart somewhere in the deep south of
America with an honest old style bluesy break down seemingly at odds with the
rest of the folk style that is Turner’s trademark.
We are far past the time when it is shocking that Turner, a
man who fronted early 2000s hardcore band Million Dead, should be so proficient
at a style normally reserved for self styled working class poets like Billy
Bragg and it should come as no surprise that the two have become friends,
bonded by music and politics, another subject that was Turner’s bread and
butter an album or two ago and yet the man who once sang a song title Thatcher
F**ked the Kids, politics makes next to no intrusion on Tape Deck Heart,
eschewed in favour of the more personal direction he has taken over maybe the
last two albums.
No song on the album feels particularly out of place but
without the thematic structure that held Turner’s previous album together the
album as a whole does not flow quite as well as you would hope. This could be a
reflection of music as a whole these days as nobody is making whole albums,
only collections of singles and if that is the case then Turner has collected a
number of great singles together here. Whether they will become classics
remains to be seen but Turner is building a body of work that if not enjoyed
then ought to be respected as he moves from angry folk polemicist to simply one
of this country’s most interesting wordsmiths working in music today.
Fans will lap up every note and word but there is not much
here for anyone who does not already enjoy Turner’s music. If you didn’t enjoy
him as a politically driven songwriter it is unlikely that you will enjoy his
more personal direction, regardless of the now seemingly permanent addition of
his longstanding touring band The Sleeping Souls, (Florence has her Machine,
and Frank Turner has his Sleeping Souls). The mainstream attention that his
appearance on the “green and pleasant land” of the pre-Olympics ceremony may
have been on Turner’s mind as he wrote and recorded the tracks that make up
Tape Deck Heart but if he’s nervous about the fact that he is less of a cult
act these days then it doesn’t show on what is a mature offering from a
constantly maturing musician.
Quote attribution: Dance Yrself Clean - Frank Turner interview & Asia Life Magazine - Frank Turner interview
Link to article on WINOL website.
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| Photo credit - Ben Morse |
Quote attribution: Dance Yrself Clean - Frank Turner interview & Asia Life Magazine - Frank Turner interview
Link to article on WINOL website.
