William Doyle - Great Spans of Muddy Time

Look at that sleeve! The fantastically titled, latest and greatest from the former East India Youth-er, in which he fully realises his vision of the great British pop eccentric he's spent the past decade tinkering away at becoming. Well, i suspect it was always within him, it's just here it appears most obviously and naturally. It's telling the record was made spontaneously last year during enforced isolation, alone at the wheel.

Doyle is still, within the context of art pop/rock outsiderdom, a very young man, though Great Spans... does its level best to suggest a world view both wiser and more weathered, blurred with a quixotic verdancy usually only permitted by time. This kind of songwriting often feels the sole preserve of a dying breed, ala Eno, Wyatt, Hitchcock, Newell, but Doyle's certainly occupying space in the same wheelhouse. Here he flits between Cleaners from Venus style art pop new wave earworms and more abstract instrumental compositions, tied together with a grainy analog charm. There are, what you might understand in radio man parlance as, obvious 'singles' here, though i find they make most sense within the context of the album - this isn't a record you wanna pick apart and separate out. Yep, this is an 'album', that apparently old fashioned concept. No wonder he dropped the East India Youth moniker: Doyle's got old bones. What we might also understand as 'classic'...