Someone dial 999 and get the church bells a-ringin' - Richard Hawley's plucking the heartstrings like an angelic messenger.
Retaining the vintage trademark of Richard Hawley's previous albums that alerted us to his singular prowess, his sixth album 'Truelove's Gutter' is a soft-struck mellow-mooded love affair that lacks the retro dancehall bite and immediacy of 'Lady's Bridge' and 'Cole's Corner', but makes up in spades in an address to lovers that allows Hawley's baritone croon all the space and time of a lazy sunday afternoon. Musically, Hawley's adopted a lush score that features the unusual instrumentation of megabass waterphone and crystal braschet, to try and capture the sounds in his head he writes.
The even-tempered feel of the album takes in songs on fractured love, the hearts pleas and the love lives of his native city of Sheffield, as well as the darker subject of drug dependency. The working class romanticism pervades as daybreaks over tenement housing washing lines on 'As The Dawn Breaks', while the engrossing 'Open Up Your Door' delivers a Roy Orbison-like cupidean address that love is our only saving grace, a track to warm the cockles of the heart as a fired-up string section play for their dinner.
'For Your Lover Give Some Time' and 'Don't Get Up In Your Heart' speak quiet and wise words, the superlative 'For Your Lover...' singing romantically to cello and harpsichord accompaniment - "...here's a toast to you Helene, to all the cinema's ran in from the rain, laughing, clutching soaking newspapers to your face...", while the latter has the crystal braschet adding the haunting qualities of a musical saw, and 'Soldier On' counsels to brave through the battlefield of life and roves with coruscating guitar that rips up the delicacy with aplomb. 'Ashes On The fire' adopts the country air of Jim Reeves as Hawley strums and croons, while the lengthy 'Remorse Code' features lush harmonic arrangement as the dark side of addiction is tackled with all the grace and tact of Neil Young's 'Needle and the Damage Done', singing - "...and those white lines, made your eyes white, unenlightened lies... the ship is wrecked, with all hands...", conceivably it's his most powerful songwriting to date.
As if there aren't enough haunting songs to resonate as you go about your business, the closer 'Don't You Cry' is a ten minute wonder that shivers down the spine as the quirky instruments add spectral dimensions to the arrangement. 'Truelove's Gutter' is the assured and confident work of a composite artist less out to impress than to render the timeless qualities of true art.
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