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An album that very nearly didn't make it - 'Home Again' was recorded early 2005 when Edwyn suffered a serious illness. Work on the album was completed earlier this year with the album showing scant evidence of the stroke he suffered. Best known as the man who fronted the post-punk Orange Juice and freshly squeezed the timeless 'Rip It Up' and 'I Can't Help Myself', as well as four albums whose riffs and Chic/Stax rhythms still send out eddies to the multitude of successive guitar bands, Edwyn has also recorded 5 solo albums and scored a hit with the single 'Girl Like You'.
With rags, blues and ditties, 'Home Away' has the gruff, husky, honeyed-voice wrenching his conjunctions like he's cracking nuts and crooning through tracks with a self-assured ease. 'One Is A Lonely Number' lays down a banjo-looped pop melody that taps away - "...and you will try/ and you will fail/ again and again..." like a Samuel Beckett trip-up, with the winsome 'Home Again' a reflective sat-on-the-porch-song as Edwyn croons over boyhood memories. The top distillation 'You'll Never Know (My Love)' slides down like a smooth cognac with its' Orange Juice ease of funky rhythm and cadence lighting up the dance halls.
Slide guitar on the bluesy '7th Son' has Edwyn with over-dub and the lines "...sold you out for what its' worth/ welcome to the planet earth..." like some Reverend Pop, but the heart of this album lies in its' search for meaning and to make sense of an age, highlighted with 'Leviathan' - full, broody and apocalyptic with visions of a wasteland, and 'Liberteenage Rag' with a gleeful jam-like spontaneity as Edwyn addresses the virtual age - "...there's nothing sacred/ as far as I can see...".
'It's In Your Heart' forms a scant ditty, with 'Written In Stone' and 'A Heavy Sigh' vacuous and tedious, the latter unredeemed by its' rhythm - "...I'm quite content here on the underground...". 'Superstar Talking Blues', however, kicks like a wannabe 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' with a runaway train riddim and the demi-god deflating lines - "...bourbon in the cola...because your not the voice of reason/ superstar...", and the sunny pumping-pop of 'One Track Mind' finds a ramblin' man song that jumps to the close of 'Then I Cried'.
Edwyn may not have the range of the late great Billy McKenzie, or the songbook of the National Treasure that is Badly Drawn Boy, but 'Home Again' croons with a warm heart with songs looking for directions home and to the search for Meaningful Street, the pop sensibility carrying the weight which lyrically skims rather than charters the oceans.
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