What have we here? More jangly guitar pop from the seemingly inexhaustible supply to be found in any major city in the world. This time, Manchester has supplied us with Ste Guy and his debut album “Fairground In The Trees” and he is looking backwards all the time.
It’s a sorry state of affairs when the best track on an album by a singer songwriter is both the first track and an instrumental at that but that is the case here. “I Can Feel It” manages the not inconsiderable feat of turning some laconic whistling and the kind of musicianship that you’d expect of an Irish covers band into a decent little song. However, the rest of the album slides rapidly into an overly reverential, unimaginative and badly recorded reprise of the past. Ste Guy is like The Go-Betweens without the irony, The Pastels without the humour or the Vaselines without the attitude. The key word –as you might have worked out by now – is without.
There’s little sense of identity here. Ste Guy sounds just like any other lo-fi pretender to the throne of mediocrity and the miserable sound reflects the lack of care put into this album and, according to the credits, he is responsible for everything so he has no one to blame but himself. Dull is too kind a description for this album.
Available from CD Baby.