When I eventually thought about it, the clue was in the name as who would call themselves Mr Diagonal unless the intention was to produce music skewed from the straight and narrow and, duly, “Join The Dots” runs up the road that the mainstream now goes down.
Normal rules don’t really apply here as these are not songs that fit into a particular genre and, if your memory stretches far enough back to remember a world without online payments, you might even be able to draw parallels with the kind of excessively literate songwriters that inhabited the then very sparkly and profitable world of light entertainment. Perhaps that does a disservice to Mr Diagonal – but, in all likelihood, not – yet there are undoubtedly far more, and bigger, words to be found in the songs on this album than you would find in ten more conventional albums. Add in the quirky, even eccentric, presentation of said songs and the result is almost perfect big city festival fodder where the suitably receptive audiences can quickly migrate from Merlot consumption to rapturous applause.
“Join The Dots” is indeed a literate album and one infused with decent degrees of both sentimentality and poetry which, I would suppose, makes it unfashionably fashionable at least while the summer sun shines. Anyway, I can’t remember the last time that Wombles appeared in the lyrics to a song. Mr Diagonal wins again.