Strangely Charming

I can recall the exact time when the phrase “singer/songwriter” first started to infuse every fibre of my being with nausea and dread.

It was at the Guildford Festival back in 2003, where I had the grave misfortune to be reviewing, and interviewing in some cases, the acts on the second stage: a seemingly never-ending conveyor belt of one-man-band troubadours who were as distinct from one another as the blades of grass I was sitting on. Never have I been so bored doing something I should have been enjoying.

Add to that the apparently infinite number of albums and EPs up for review, invariably complemented by an annoyingly fawning press release (aren’t they all?), and I would happily ingest boiling mercury through my eye sockets before hearing another one. I don’t like singer/songwriters. They annoy me. More accurately, I don’t like singer/songwriters with record deals. They’re a bit harder to ignore.

South African singer/songwriter Yoav gets off to a good start though: I didn’t have a press release to read. Spin the disc, and I’m thankfully not affronted with lackadaisical acoustic strumming backing some nasally pitched buffoon as he hilariously skewers the banality of the everyman’s daily existence.

This is of course a good sign, and the album itself is a consistent pleasure on the first listen. Yoav at least had the decency to absorb the influences of electronica and the New York club and dance scene whilst touring the local gig circuit, and they’re present here on his debut album.

Perhaps I’m (relatively) enthused about Charmed & Strange at this point because I don’t immediately hate it. Yet the album isn’t involving enough for me to be peel back the layers and offer a cultural analysis of each stratum. After all that’s what these longer reviews are for, but one can always pinpoint the paragraph in which the writer starts to run out of steam. (Just to clarify: it’s this one.)

It has quality about it, sure; the acoustic guitar is used here more as a percussive instrument, and the album as a whole is sufficiently cerebral and forward-thinking to be recommended to those who dig this kind of thing.