He Flies, But Not Quite As High as the Moon

Originally posted on 24/1/10

Fly Yellow Moon - Fyfe Dangerfield - Album Review

I hate the majority of solo artists. Folk on ego trips whose act goes under their own name, when very often there's 4 people behind them, who actually help make the songs the lead person makes a living by. What's worse is when someone like Fyfe pops up, having been in a band for quite a while and then thinking he can go and be solo. It makes him, and the other people who've done it before and will do it since, seem bigheaded. Occasionally, there is an artist who justifies leaving their poor bandmates in the lurch, but whether or not Fyfe managed to do it with his first effort is up for debate.

As with most people who go solo after a few albums with a band, the work will be compared more than considered, and while that can knock some sense into the offending egomaniac a lot of the time, it doesn't always. Guillemots are a band whose success came from being one of the more eclectic bunches in music, by means of using typewriters as instruments and putting an 11 minute plus work of art at the end of their first album. In Fly Yellow Moon, Fyfe does seem to acknowledge that it takes a full band to recreate that sound, with most of the ten songs being quiet, stripped back affairs, often being played with only acoustic guitar/piano. The new style doesn't suit his voice much though, as most of his previous work was better on the more up-tempo tracks where the rawness of his voice could be put to good use. Subsequently, a lot of the stuff he tries to pull off on Fly Yellow Moon sounds out of his range, both pitch-wise and style-wise - he doesn't sound like he should be singing this stuff.

Musically, while the grandeur of previous work isn't there there are certain moments of brilliance which seem to borrow inspiration from the unlikeliest of places, ie So Brand New where Fleetwood Mac and Simon and Garfunkel spring immediately to mind. As mentioned previously, while this is a low-tempo album, the better moments are when he abaondons all pretences and goes back to full-on pop songs with When You Walk in the Room and She Needs Me, the latter of which sounding like a cross between Elton John and an old Casio drum machine.

In short, the lack of things that are noticeable in this album are reflected in this review, because aside from the songs I picked out, there's not much more to remember this for. It's decent for a few spins, but in the end mostly sounds like acoustic wallpaper, something to put on in the background and not really pay attention to, which it seems like Fyfe was thinking when he made it. Get back with the band, now please.