All The Pleasures of the World
From couples feuding in hallways to the ones staring blankly into their dinner plates, Crayon Fields explore love in all its permutations on their second album ‘All The Pleasures of the World’, writes SHAUN PRESCOTT.
Love songs can be tiring creatures: on the one hand gratuitously smitten while on the other, floundering, inarticulate, pathetic. For a craft so ubiquitous – so regularly seized upon and cursorily executed – it’s not surprising how many fail to capture the crucial ambiguities, heartaches, anxieties, thrilling miseries and all-consuming imperatives of love. Geoff O’Connor never sidesteps matters of the heart – as his 2007 Sly Hats album will attest – and All The Pleasures of the World gorges on the ecstatic risks that come with finally laying yourself naked and afraid at the feet of a significant other. It’s positively smitten, but equally scared stiff.
No longer can you listen to Crayon Fields and imagine four painfully naive boys writing twee-obscured paeans to transitory love interests. Sex has entered the room now and on a few occasions the rhythm section aims directly at the hips, albeit hips that rotate in narrow circumferences. At first glance All The Pleasures is blindly enraptured: a saccharine, pastel-hued edifice emblazoned with frank and mildly discomforting admissions, but as always, O’Connor?s demeanour undermines the starry-eyed, happy-go-lucky certainty that erodes ?dumb? love songs. His voice betrays frayed nerves, even while he sings, ?When I sing to you I’m in paradise.? In the hands of another vocalist, these songs might fail to be anything other than despicably pretty pop songs hosting despicably honeyed sentiments. It reinforces the suspicion that Crayon Fields is O’Connor?s band – because his presence is indispensible.
?This album comes close to capturing the disorientating rush of emotions that will see most of us, at some point or another, embracing the unknown.?
But even if that were definitely the case, O’Connor wouldn’t fare so well without his ensemble and the guest contributions here. Again, the initially stultifying prettiness of this album is gradually complicated by subtle bouts of miasmic melancholy – as during the closing sequence on ?Voice of Paradise?, a thick plasma of minor key yearning awash in blissfully intricate layers of harmony and light. Compared to this and ?Where The Light Isn’t Cruel? – the towering achievement here – the singles ?Mirrorball? and ?All The Pleasures…? sound comparatively skeletal: confident and eager to be taken at face value. But O’Connor has seen the pain of floundering love (?There are many wasted couples fighting in doorways/And many more out for dinner staring blankly into their plates?) and is adamant that this will never happen to him. Whether a truly perfect love is actually possible or not is another uncertainty laid bare by his delivery. The noble intentions are humbling and poignant.
All The Pleasures never deviates from the love struck: even the finger-plucked sadness at the beginning of ?Timeless? opens with the line, ?When I wake up next you I forget I have a day to be dressed for.? Here, and during ?Lucky Again?, O’Connor acknowledges how dangerous this intoxication is, how violent the shock would be if it were suddenly taken away. That looming possibility is at the heart of this album’s warm power, and why none of these love songs – no matter how joyous they may sound – fall victim to cloying fantasy. This album comes close to capturing the disorientating rush of emotions that will see most of us, at some point or another, embracing the unknown. Now let’s cross our fingers and hope, for Geoff’s sake, that Crayon Fields never have to release a break-up album.
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All The Pleasures of the World is out now on Chapter Music.