Blueboy - If Wishes Were Horses
£24.00
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Have you heard the NTS In Focus special on Sarah? There's three Blueboy songs on it for a reason, more than any other band. Sarah is celebrated for the same thing it's criticised for: formula. If you don't like their particular formula (the fey, the twee, the romantically crippled, the soft at heart), I can understand why you might see that as a bad thing. And if you do, well, happy days and well done. The great thing with Blueboy, though, is that they represent a gentle evolution of the Sarah sound while at the same time utterly typifying it. You can't ignore Keith Girdler's fragile slip of a voice and therefore it's very Sarah-ness (all the more haunted in the wake of his untimely death), but there's a few broader brushstrokes here than you might expect. Alongside the airless jangle, they do occasion the odd nod to the parallel world of Creation and Slowdive's view from a bedroom dreampop, and there are moments of restraint not a million miles removed from the slowcore of Red House Painters - imagine Kozelek more hopeful romantic than miserable sod. And did i mention the strings on Cloud Babies? The imagined future world of indiedom if lad culture hadn't kicked its head in. In 92, it could have gone two ways...
