Gavin Osborn : 'Meeting Your Heroes'
Released: Out Now!!!
Label: Banquet Records
Back in 2005 I had the pleasure of seeing the brilliant stand-up comic, Daniel Kitson. Arriving on stage he told us of his dilemma: he wanted a support act for the tour. But if they were good he ran the risk of being upstaged, whereas if they weren't any good then we'd rightly feel ripped off. His solution was to offer a support act that was entirely incomparable to his own comedy set. And so this was the first time I heard Gavin Osborn's wonderful combination of whimsical, twee folk and witty, touching lyrics.
After that it was an excruciating two years of hearing nothing more than a couple of MySpace demos before he released his debut album, In The Twee Small Hours. It was wonderful live album that proved to be the ideal format to capture the beauty of his songs. Two more years on and his first studio album has finally arrived. Meeting Your Heroes treads a fine tightrope of staying true to Osborn's one-man-and-a-guitar roots and taking advantage of the additional production opportunities a studio affords. Osborn manages it well, with most songs opening on guitar before introducing some gentle percussion, strings or trumpet that never becomes overwhelming.
The variety in the album is clear from the first two tracks: the first is a six minute story about a guy called Charlie and his desperate, embarrassing, and entirely relatable attempts to get the girl of his dreams on his 18th birthday. This is then followed by a silly but true story about a man who tried to rob Burger King that's just over a minute long.
The brilliantly named There's An Awful Lot Wrong With A Little Bump 'n' Grind is one of a few songs on the album about doomed romances. It's a strikingly honest tale of a man and woman unable to connect because they both love music enough that it matters to them, but can't find any common musical ground. It's heart-breaking because anyone that really cares about music will know exactly how true it is. It's in these songs that relate stories in the first-person that Osborn's half-talking, half-singing vocal style really shines. It adds a sort of honesty to the songs, and makes you genuinely believe that the events related in the lyrics actually happened to him, even if they're made up.
The second heart-breaker picks up the story of Charlie from the album's opening song, who having finally got the girl, comes to the awful realisation that the only way to make her happy is to let her go. In contrast, Not Going Anywhere is practically the same situation, but instead with a guy that is desperate to hang on to the girl, no matter what.
Later in FM 2030 Osborn experiments with singing just above a whisper and playing as quietly as possible. This is to relate the true story of a man who believed he was immortal but died of cancer so ended up cryogenically frozen, of course. I hated it at first, thinking it was a great song ruined by this strange stylistic experiment gone wrong, but after listening to it on a good pair of headphones, being able to hear all the subtleties in his voice and guitar turned it into one of the stand-out tracks on the album.
Sweet Bedford and Airport Song reflect on the theme of nostalgia while providing some variety being performed on banjo and piano respectively. A song about a man trying to reduce his carbon emissions should be funny but suffers by coming across as a little too preachy.
As a whole, Meeting Your Heroes stands in sharp contrast to Osborn's debut album. In The Twee Small Hours was a disc I'd put on at 2am in the morning when I was feeling down and wanted cheering up. This album is a lot more personal, a lot more bleak, and a lot more touching. It tugs on the heart strings and pulls you in to these sad stories of loss and melancholy reflections on the past. But crucially those songs are balanced by tracks about silly, ridiculous things that stop the album from becoming too depressing.
Osborn brings a wit and sparkle to even the saddest of lyrics, and despite a couple of mis-fires in the first half of the album where the songs don't quite live up to the strength of their ideas, Meeting Your Heroes is a lovely album. That might sound like an odd description, but to throw around adjectives like 'brilliant', 'amazing' and 'stunning' would be to do it a disservice. It's a quiet, dignified album that won't set your heart racing but might just remind you why you like music in the first place. It's lovely.
Words: Dean Love
Posts: 2
Reply #1 on : Thu October 29, 2009, 19:22:10
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Posts: 2
Reply #2 on : Sun November 01, 2009, 20:09:53