It’s difficult to write about Bruno Merz’s sparse and elegant music without making the obvious comparisons to Nick Drake. I’m not the first to point it out and I won’t be the last. But there is something in the minimalism, the delivery, the restraint and the understatement that he adopts that make it hard not to drop the D word. The lyrics have the same compressed style and purposeful simplicity nature, almost like folkloric haikus or chilled nursery rhymes and he also uses similar elemental imagery that coloured Nick’s songs.
But whereas Drake revelled in hippy meadows and the green fields of an older England, Merz instead offers a warning, one which suggests the gentlest of wake up calls, to open our eyes to the effect that we, as the human race, have on the world. He predicts rising seas, broken fields and burning skies but knows that it isn’t to late to stop the relentless march towards oblivion, if we just open our eyes to our destructive ways.
The real charm of the song is that it is rebellious in the quietest of ways, it is happy to point out and suggest rather than lead and rabble-rouse, which is perfect for the modern age and our belligerent attitudes. In a world where people seem ever more frequently turning their back on expert or academic advice, dismissive of science and show open hostility towards people who hold opposing views, maybe we need a quiet revolution, one guided by gentle reflection and subtle suggestion, one inspired by beauty rather than browbeaten by dystopian visions and chilling rhetoric.
Maybe Bruno Merz is more than just a writer of eloquent and beautiful songs, maybe he, and musicians like him, can be the inspiration we need to change our ways. Even a snowball can become an avalanche, maybe this song represents the first flakes of snow we need to build it.
Being someone who finds words, wordplay and interesting turns of phrase…well interesting, I feel that there are few greater pleasures than looking at the list of song titles on an album and being greeted by strange names and intriguing subject matter. What after all is a Nested Infinity? Who is Mr. Bikinis? What is so exciting about The History of Fishes that you would be driven to write a song, or at least a tune about it?
Music is made for many reasons, some of them creative, driven by integrity, other times…well, not so much. For everyone who is trying to express a personal view of the world there is someone looking for a quick buck, for every outside the box thinker there is a plagiarist, happy to follow a trend or jump on a band wagon. And then you come across songs such as Alan Osborne’s You Are My Home, a song built around the most honest and heartfelt of emotions and nothing less than a declaration of love, writ large and publicly via song and video.
It says something about the quality of Andy Milsom’s songwriting and indeed the band as a whole’s ability to authentically delivery what I guess we will have to call British Americana, that it is difficult to spot the original tracks from the covers on this album. The fact that they chose to cover The Stones and Tom Petty (twice) gives you a good idea of the musical world they inhabit…though their inclusion of Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus rendered into a grooving gospel-rocker also shows just how broadly their minds work.
Well, that’s a bit of a relief, this latest release from Dynamos isn’t a cover of the Big Joe Turner rock’n’roll classic. Not that I have anything against the Kansas City blues shouter, it is just that I think in this day and age, all right minded music scribblers need to be spending more time helping promote, support and give space to rising, original acts before the world is taken over by TV show chancers, marketing department dictated wannabes and a wave of rose tinted nostalgia. Think of us music writers as the environmental activists of the arts and culture scene.
For a band who wilfully describe themselves as “psychotic pop, psychedelic punk and androgynous rock n’ roll,” Co-Morbid is a surprisingly together album. Together in the sense that whilst it is wild and raw, challenging and visceral, often intense, always surprising, the songs hold together because of an accessibility and even a brilliant pop sensibility at times. Sure it is often buried under a garage rock growl, glam excesses, paisley visions and prowling punk postures songs like My Former Baby reveals them to be brilliant purveyors of Kinks-esque kitchen sink dramas with a New Wave make over.
Cosmic folk-pop. Is that a thing? Well, if not, let’s make it a thing, after all we need a suitable category to put The Raft in, so why not that? As 
Let’s get one thing straight before we go any further. Singing close harmony is not easy. In fact it’s damn difficult, and demands the highest level of every skill that a singer possesses to get it anywhere close to being right.
The late seventies was always a tricky time for music genre labels in the chaotic swirl of the recent upheavals and ripping up of rule books. Even now balding gentlemen or a certain age hold very strong opinions over just what was pub rock, what was punk and what was new wave. If pub rock was the bluesy muscle that fuelled the sound of punk, new wave was the twitchy, agitated and tighter sounding music which stepped through the door as the last clatter of punk faded out on the chill wind. That’s my thoughts on the subject, not that it matters…just don’t ask me quite where Power Pop fits in!
Recently signed to Manchester’s Eromeda Records, 
