Paddy McAloon
I Trawl the Megahertz

THE REVIEW

No Preamble. No dramatic ending.

Aseptically, as befits a work of great craftsmanship like this, but teetering between the depiction of total and universal despair and a cold and detached impressionist painting, I lay out a few lines to introduce distracted readers to a potential listening experience that is potentially... I'm at a loss for an adjective. And then I said no preamble.

Here he is, Paddy McAloon,  you no longer recognize him. No longer is he that slightly snobbish and moderately arrogant dandy who tread the 80s and 90s aboard a silent chariot like Prefab Sprout. A charlatan wielding the scepter of the best songwriter around. He had crafted and awarded that prize to himself.

Now everything has changed. Let's not dwell on health issues. Almost losing one's sight is a significant problem, but it is said to greatly enhance musical sensitivity and compositional ability. Some consolation. For him, certainly yes. But if it's not just on an aesthetic level that one changes, if it's the ambition that changes face, then perhaps one attempts the path not simply of extremely high-class symphonic pop (I don't know, think Pet Sounds), perhaps one tries to explore alternative paths to excess, (then think Gavin Byars)  running a huge risk, placing all the chips accumulated over a lifetime on the table, with the risk of having them blown away by the first passerby. Oh yes. Paddy's real affliction has always been that. A cursed ambition to find the perfect album, first in the Sophisti-pop realm and now in the almost classical realm. A sick and fascinating perfectionism.

Some have labeled this work as Film Music, somewhat akin to saying it's suitable as a background for a documentary on tropical fish or child labor in Poland, but this is extremely reductive and also very misleading.

There's substance here. Whether good or not is not for me to determine. It's up to you. I won't take the responsibility of judging it for you, I won’t decide for you whether it's worth the painstaking effort of pressing the left mouse button “Download now” or not. Oh no, too easy. I could say “in my opinion it's this or that” but you don't care about my judgment, as I have no credentials on the matter. I'll just say that there’s an initial track, (certainly indebted to the aforementioned Byars) magnificently orchestrated, a symphony of about twenty minutes that leaves you all ears, I’m already leaning too much, whether it’s good or bad I don’t know, I won’t tell you, it’s not my place. The rest lingers there, in that insubstantial space between the corporeal and the ethereal, between the grace of a dawn and a horrid will-o’-the-wisp. But giving it a judgment, evidently, is not my place at all. 

I only do what is my place, then. I won’t even give you samples, no one listens to them. I tell you to download it (sue me, you rogues!) and listen to it if you like. Then if you like it, you buy it. See? No dramatic ending.