Rum Old Lot ... (***)

8 Oct 1998
Written by Peter Kane

Courtesy of J. Werb

Rum old lot, The Beautiful South.

Prematurely middle-aged, musically middle-of-the-road and, beneath it all, that dark undertow where life seems to have been reduced to a cosmic joke with a particularly lousy punchline.

Not an obvious recipe for success when it comes to selling lots of records but, of course, they do; millions of the buggers in the case of their Carry On Up The Charts: The Best Of in 1994.

Maybe pop music doesn't have to be aspirational or celebratory or escapist after all. Sometimes a certain rueful tunefulness will do just as well. That and the comfort of knowing that other people are leaking inside just as badly.

Quench is the band's seventh outing and, in shape and tone, it differs little from what has gone before. It comprises 13 more songs from the collective pen of Paul Heaton and Dave Rotheray that are jaunty on top, jaundiced underneath.

Even by their own standards, the opening How Long's A Tear Take To Dry? is positively bouncy. Driven by a slide guitar, funky electric piano and a somewhat tentative flute it deals with one of their favourite topics: the domestic dust-up. Men and women just weren't made to get along, it seems. "The flowers smell sweeter, the closer you are to the grave," goes the chorus. Which is nice.

What else? Well, there's The Lure Of The Sea (about suicide), Big Coin (wretched Mammon), Perfect 10 (more sexual politics) and plenty of stuff about the demon drink. Losing Things has a Latin lilt to it and Dumb is a simple love song with a touch of the doo wops. There's neither room nor need for any virtuoso instrumental set-pieces, it's all in the words. As for the tunes, they just kind of shuffle along behind. The Slide, though, does rather more than that, mixing strings, a hint of gospel and Heaton's most persuasive vocal performance. The quietly desolate Your Father & I rounds it all off leaving a suitably bitter aftertaste; pretty all the same and a sitar too.

Nothing to get too excited about, then, just another Beautiful South record. But Quench is still comforting in that uniquely discomforting way of theirs. After all, when it comes right down to it, what is there really to celebrate? Time for another drink, probably.