When in the right mood, Songs can be particularly effective. Its simple, cyclic waves provide a pleasant and dreamy background, and Woodhouse’s voice is, when you’re prone to such a slow drawl, wonderfully careful and caressing. “The Loop” is the standout song on the record, a calm build and fall, cascading soft piano work enveloping layered falsetto to beautiful effect. But Songs doesn’t hit ‘beautiful’ enough, settling instead for just pleasant and nice. Whilst obvious comparisons include The xx and James Blake at their least gloomy, Woodhouse has, with his more optimistic and less shadowed production, admirably crafted his own niche in a clouded genre, which is impressive up to a point. But when the songs themselves don’t stack up, the confidence and tinge of originality to Deptford Goth falls apart, and what’s left is as bare as Woodhouse’s shy breaths in between verses.
First single “The Lovers” tends to largely drag, its stuttered vocals and plodding tempo ruining the scattered electronic production, some of the best on the record, while “Near To A River” takes far too long to get to a lovely, if unsatisfying climax – too much of Songs promises with its immediate aesthetic without then delivering anything close to memorable. Lyrically it’s full of clichés and forgettable repetitions; “Two Hearts”’ refrain “love is enough” hides behind its incomprehensibility, and “A Shelter, A Weapon” features wave after wave of eye-roll inducing and distracting lines – “got love/a lifetime / use it like a weapon baby”; “if you want me you can have me ‘til the end of time”. Songs brings to mind Active Child with the falsetto, harp, and 80’s turned down to an everyone’s-asleep level, but without that forgiving old-school influence that Pat Grossi keeps close to his chest, Woodhouse’s lyrics feel a touch embarrassing next to his modern peers.
Another frustrating concern of Songs is one of a bigger picture – many UK indie/alternative artists in recent years have put a focus on vocals that sound utterly disinterested. Of course, this technique isn’t something relatively new, but it has certainly become grating, especially when the structures around said vocals are, in this instance, so sparse. The xx employed it perfectly on their first record, but by Coexist it had gotten stale; Alex Turner’s increasingly plodding, gravelly voice had, by the third Artic Monkeys album, managed to suck all of the energy out of a band that relied on it so much, and Thom Yorke’s whelps and crazed hums that so characterized Radiohead up to Hail to the Thief would feel completely out of place on their hushed recent efforts. It’s not always a bad thing, but it does often paint British Indie artists as lacking in feeling, and Songs absolutely feels that way.
But maybe that’s the point of Songs – it’s a blurred, non-distractive wash of soft-indie, at times almost becoming instrumental as Woodhouse’s plush tones blur into the background – it’d probably sound similar if all of the vocal lines were just inputted into a soft brass synth – and perhaps it’s just not meant to be affecting. Woodhouse’s voice does nearly get there – the quietest parts of “The Circle” are touchingly sparse, and “The Code”’s chorus injects a slight moment of soul - but there’s not much of Songs that really demands repeat invested listens. It’s certainly a record to do something else to, but spare a few select cuts (“The Loop”, “Two Hearts”), Songs goes from a soft, subtle and intriguing first listen to ultimately monotonous and pulling.
Songs lives up to its simple, if boring name – which could be over-thought, in which case it’s pretentious and slightly annoying, or under-thought, Woodhouse simply not putting the effort in. Such a dilemma sums up the record perfectly – is Songs truly felt, are Woodhouse’s soft dreary tones meant to be so divisively grey and subtle, or are they simply a product of doing the bare-minimum, crafting something passable, and nice, but largely just nice (A refrain of “at least we got close” on “The Loop” hitting a little close to the album’s heart). Its intentions are probably the former, but it usually ends up sounding like the latter.
