In a somewhat cruel irony, given the slow-burning nature of ‘Cole’s Corner’, pretty much every review you will read of Richard Hawley’s latest is destined to begin with a line about how ace Arctic Monkeys think he is. All that time spent slowly but surely winning people over via good old-fashioned word of mouth, and now he’s that bloke Alex Turner mentioned in his Mercury Music Prize acceptance speech. ‘Someone call 999,’ the young star said, in case you didn’t know, ‘Richard Hawley’s been robbed.’
This quip, coupled with the fact that its creator is now unquestionably a major artist (he’s got a headlining show at the Roundhouse later this year), endows ‘Lady’s Bridge’ with a certain weight of expectation, and a weight of expectation is something that sits somewhat uncomfortably with a Richard Hawley album. The beauty of ‘Coles Corner’ was the way it crept up on you: you’d hear a song on the radio, think it was rather nice, have a friend telling you how good he was live, hear another tune somewhere and eventually go out and buy the album, then realise that everyone you knew had done the same. Now though, the fragile crooning of opener ‘Valentine’ or the unashamed romanticism of soaring single ‘Tonight The Streets Are Ours’ or the gorgeous ‘Roll River Roll’ feel instantly familiar. Certainly, the songs here are strong – the waltzy ‘Lady Solitude’, in particular, is to our ears the finest thing he’s ever done – but they are, at the same time, hard to get hugely excited about. Much like the 40-year-old’s last four albums – and probably his next four, too – it’s based around simple, honest songwriting, to which the self-explanatory sentiments of ‘I’m Looking For Someone To Find Me’ or ‘The Sun Refused To Shine’ are testament. This is not music that sits particularly well with fanfare.
No alarms and no surprises, then, but still plenty to fall in love with, and to find comfort in. And that, really, should be enough.
