Richard Walters

Everything about this album is wrong.

As soon as I picked up the CD, and saw a man eating wires like they were spaghetti, I knew this album would be awful. The man isn’t just eating wires like they are spaghetti, either: he’s looking like a cross between a younger Harry Hill and Judge Jules and sat in the kind of all-white background that made Ikea quite fashionable a few years ago.

If I was an average 14 year old, this is the kind of person I’d casually stab to death.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I put in the CD and hear a timid voice warbling above lovely (if patchily so) guitars and pianos? Scrabbling to find the press release, I find out that all this twat-fakery is a not-so-hilarious joke. Ahem.

At times Sean Lennon, at others Eliot Smith, when Walters gets it right (like on the Weather Song) he is a fantastic songwriter and emotive performer. Yet, with such stripped back production and quiet vocals, artists such as this have to exaggerate some aspect of their music: and this is where Walters needs to improve.

Both Lennon and Smith, in their own ways, use the sound of the Beatles to add accessibility and interest to their output. Though a debt to Liverpool is not obligatory, a similar point of contact or sense of melodic clarity would let this artist’s undoubted talents shine through better.

First on the list of 'lessons to be learned’, however, is that pretending you are some electro DJ from the right side of Kent is never a good idea: not even ironically.