My record collection says that I remember a band called Hipsway who briefly walked the street of success back in the days commonly referred to as the eighties so it was with a degree of curiosity that “Faultlines” by The Cowboy Mouth – featuring Grahame Skinner from the aforementioned Hipsway – was placed on the digital replacement for the turntable of love.
Sure enough, “Faultlines” sounds somewhat like an album of yesterday yet that is no bad thing as those halcyon days of questionable haircuts were also the times when melody and making songs that stick in your ears were the de facto standard. The lessons of those times have been well learned and these ten songs duly sound as if their true home would be on the better FM radio stations that inhabited the airwaves way back then. The passing of time, and it has been quite a lot of time, has also added a maturity, and consequent sentimentality, to the lyrics that suits Mr Skinner’s still intact and omnipresent voice rather well.
Even if you weren’t of those times, or even a child of those times, The Cowboy Mouth have much to offer your ears. Knowing how to put a song together properly is a skill that this band can easily demonstrate and even ears that are not hooked on retro will appreciate the simple fact that you can’t keep a good song, or songwriter, down. Not then, not now, not ever.