More on: Songdog

Label: One Little Indian
Release Date: 21/01/08
Rating:

Listening to 'A Wretched Sinner's Song' is like eavesdropping on a miserablist's 'Dear Diary' hangups. The wonderfully evocative and poetic lyrics, constantly streaming without even a single repeated refrain and the unusual, exquisite folk arrangements, beautifully bleeding one song into another, complement the bleakness, softness or deadpan humour in Lyndon Morgans' voice.

Opener 'Ruben's Tattoo' relates a mythical tale (captured on the startling album cover) about a tattoo of a mermaid on Ruben's back which constantly whispers under his skin to him and tells him to take her to a "speck of light way out at sea". The next day he's found "floating in the shallows/ his tattoo's gone and the mermaid is free". The sophisication of this record is such that our suspicions that Ruben is really Morgans' alter-ego and that this tale is a metaphor of his soul, his journey and this album, is subtly confirmed as late as track six. Here, Morgans' doppelganger describes his "old idol" of infatuation as "lovely as a poppy abloom in a ditch" (which is probably the tenderest line of the album). He alludes to his one true love on only one other track, the penultimate, with typically touching, reminiscent, metaphorical detail, and wishes for her to "join me here tonight on Porthcawl Sands".

The closer 'The Time For Miracles Is Past', however, quickly reasserts his reality, twenty years on, and some kind of resolution in the final lines: "It's only disappointment keeps me holed up in this room/But hell, I swam in disappointment inside my mother's womb/Won't you drive me up the mountain and just let the wheelchair roll." His resolution is characteristically ambiguous: does he seek destruction and death, or even an asylum of sorts, or some kind of freedom, emotionally crippled as he is, perhaps no more or less than the desire to not look for any meaningful connection with other human beings? This ambiguity cleverly brings other readings of previous tracks in to play. One thing is for sure though: for the majority of us, this album's bleakness will at some point prove tough for our Western hearts, raised as they are on humanist constructs of hope, to bear.

Song after song piles up the failed marital affairs, infidelities on both sides, the one night stands ('Kim Novak'), the sleazy 'Loser Heaven' world of fellatio, junkies and rent-boys. Images of wreaths, thorns, the Devil and Hell recur hauntingly. "It's good for my self-esteem", he sings in the midst of this, perhaps with no small irony.

He is, after all, metaphorically dead from the opening track on, a 'wretched sinner' with no hope or belief in 'salvation' of any kind. Make no mistake, to empathise with this character the whole way through this sixty minutes plus album is challenging even first time round, but the easy-going strange beauty of the music and how the lyrics impact on each other from song to song does bring out the masochist in you to listen again and again.

Jon Parry

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