Christopher Eatough is obviously a man of some decent talent. His songs are well composed and his gentle finger picking makes for a wonderfully gentle and soothing sound on the guitar. His voice, whilst sometimes indistinct, contains the ability to hold a note and hides a certain gentle contained emotion which is nicer and more realistic than the usual singer songwriter method of being ironically extrovert about your inability to convey your emotions.
That said, there are problems with this EP. Mostly, and rather simply, it's too slow. At seven songs, and the majority of songs nearing or breaking the five minute mark, it would take a genuine genius to make this an enjoyable listen the full way through and unfortunately he fails in that department. Whilst each second is an enjoyable listen, there isn't enough dynamic or growth throughout the songs to stop you getting distracted around the three minute mark, and forgetting the music is playing at all.
By far the most interesting song is the fourth track "Black Spider", where a ghostly choir kicks in around the four minute mark. The downside to this being that if it wasn't my role to listen to the whole track, I would've given up at the two minute stage; and, secondly, even when the choir kicks in it feels like such a small addition, when what was needed was a sweeping swift musical evolution and not just some minor adjustments.
The closest he gets to a real dynamic is in "Medals" where some beautiful electric guitar combined with some lightly flicked drums reminiscent of Badly Drawn Boy's Hour of Bewilderbeast album kick in. However once more these arguably come a little late to save the track, but once they are in the elegant sounds are enough to float you away and carry you gently, and with a certain musical elegance, to the song's conclusion.
The only other small criticism I would point out is that, either through personal choice, or through weak recording, the vocals sound compressed on the track. Where you expect a note to elevate to an emotionally piercing volume, it sounds like the cry gets further away as it gets louder, and what you get is a flat sounding un-natural squeal as opposed to a gripping emotional note. This might just be the reality of a cheaper recording but, when creating such a minimalist sounding EP, it arguably becomes even more important to make sure that each sound is well recorded so that every time the singer wants to break away from his usual mumbled tones, it doesn't get killed by the recording process.
Overall the EP is one that shows promise but is a long way from a piece of music I would feel happy recommending without reservation. The key to the future of Christopher Eatough is to curate, pick out the deadwood or even weaker shoots and make sure what's left is only the finest elements of his music. Cut down the songs, drop lines or whole verses if necessary and make sure that songs are a lot tighter and have a much greater range and flow to them. As I said each second individually is very enjoyable, but the cracks lie in the journey between those seconds as they turn into minutes of eventually unexciting repetitive music.