Moments of reflection and moments of melancholy. You’ll find such moments in abundance on “Today I Need The Light”, the debut album from The Savings and Loan. From that you will no doubt correctly deduce that here isn’t the place to go looking for those three minute pop songs that lift the spirit.
Instead, you get well written tales of disappointment and disillusion all taken at a pace that is suggestive more of a steady development than the bright light of inspiration. Martin Donnelly, accordingly, walks through the songs like a man who knows only too well that the sky is filled with clouds of grey. Rather amusingly (at least for a reviewer), it is easy to compare the music, especially “The Star of County Down”, of this Scottish duo to any number of downbeat practitioners of wounded Americana but still temper that conclusion with thoughts that this might be something of a deliberate pastiche of said genre. After all, there’s too much intelligence in the words to assume that fate had merely lent a hand in the creation of this album.
I came to think of this album as the aural equivalent of a Wim Wenders movie in that everybody will claim to like it but nobody would go to see it on a Saturday night. There is, it would seem, a time and a place for everything.
Available from the Song By Toad website.