One day in the sun shiny future, a great philosopher will ponder how pop music could have the survived both the onslaught of both the digital clones and overpowering stench of corporate sponsorship. Perhaps they will even conclude – researched on the then current iPhone 26, of course – that it was low budget quirkiness that kept these songs of the people alive within the faded walls of long forgotten underground tea shops. Perhaps they will even recognise “Midnight Tequila” by Freschard & Stanley Brinks as a signpost on the road to the survival of the genre.
You can call them, quite rightly, quirky with this duo’s minimalist, and almost deadpan, delivery making these twelve songs seems more like the product of a casual encounter than the work of talented musicians. That, however, is just their style for, underneath it all, what you get for your money is a collection of songs that no computer could ever create. You might even regard these songs as comparable with the best of the early days of country music and it takes but a small dash of imagination to hear Hank Williams singing a song like “Milestone”. “Midnight Tequila” isn’t, of course, a country album yet Clemence Freschard and Stanley Brinks have spray painted it liberally with the trademark blue collar sentimentality of the genre, but theirs is a sentimentality that doesn’t look to a rose-tinted past for inspiration and that is their gloriously unique selling point. “Success” and “I’m The Boss” are the proof that songs of today can soar.
I can imagine that the casual listener force fed from birth on a diet of dance music and indie rock would find “Midnight Tequila” a bit too much for their attention deficit brain. I can even imagine the followers of lo-fi indie pop finding “Midnight Tequila” a bit too extrovert to go with their woolly cardigans but, for lovers of pop music, it is abundantly clear that Freschard & Stanley Brinks have given us an album destined to spend a lot of time on the turntables of today and tomorrow.