Grant Nicholas
Yorktown Heights

THE REVIEW

You listen to his songs and think that reaching fifty wouldn't be so bad like this.

The 47-year-old Welshman Grant Nicholas, voice of Feeder—one of the less talked about and therefore less fortunate bands in the history of modern British indie rock—releases “Yorktown Heights,” his debut solo album. If one had to explain the nature of this album to a layperson of the Cardiff band, it wouldn't be something simple, because the connection between this predominantly acoustic rock work and the career as rockers—or presumed ones—of Feeder, although not apparent, is there, in the substance of the lyrics and harmonies rather than the music; nevertheless, the listening will surely be appreciated even by many who are not even aware of the Welsh group's existence. What emerges from the first listen, in fact, is that Grant Nicholas is made to write music, carefree, sometimes simple but true and without typically fashionable approaches that have ensured that Feeder didn't become a particularly successful band.

A full fifteen tracks for Nicholas's solo debut, opening with the single “Soul Mates,” with simple structure and a melancholy cadence but with that immediacy that made it chosen as the piece to anticipate the release of the album, while the album seems to assume its identity starting only from the second track, “Hitori”—in Maori language, “story”—and “Tall Trees,” one of the pearls of the record revealing Nicholas's more introverted side. There's also room for tracks we could call more commercial, to capture the audience (niche but often following him in the most remote venues and pubs across Europe) such as “Robots” and particularly “Vampires” which, in the chord progression, recalls the much better-known “Wonderwall.” Among the more successful pieces from the Newport singer, and yet over-the-top with the melodies of “Joan Of Arc”  almost a seventies revival, while after a couple of filler tracks like “Isolation” and the good “Hope” whose style breaks the album's melancholy cadence, comes the second single “Time Stood Still” where Nicholas's carefree and genuine pen is unmistakable. It continues with well-crafted acoustics, “Counting Steps” whose romantic touch anticipates the album's close with “Silent Space” and especially with “Safe In Peace…” which picks up the retro style that is returning these days in the music scene.

There is the simplicity of the acoustic guitar, good mixing but above all lots of emotions in this debut album by Grant Nicholas, who in twenty years of music with Feeder has shown he can range from post-grunge influences to punk rock, from indie to britpop without lacking quality and passion, and this “Yorktown Heights” is nothing but a further confirmation of this, another piece to his puzzle of creativity, an album that in my opinion if signed by Chris Martin or Noel Gallagher, would be hailed as a masterpiece but since it bears the signature of a charming Welshman excessively from the “hardly understandable English”—source a friend who spoke with him after a live in Milan—with the look of a street musician searching for who knows what, and with a career that could have gone better, it will remain a modest niche album, to be listened to and tried to play in the room, thinking in the end that reaching fifty wouldn't be so bad like this.