It’s not just true love that waits, actually. The poor chap has been hanging on all year for this review, so it’s high time. Fortunately, there’s a fair bit to admire on his debut EP, as well as the odd dud.
Paul Brennan is a Witney-based singer-songwriter with an apparent fondness for early Idlewild and a world-weary folksiness redolent of The Decembrists’ Colin Meloy. The title track, perhaps his most enjoyable number, has a puppyish indie bounce absent from his more introspective offerings. The title is borrowed from an (inevitably) American cult of virginity-before-marriage, complete with pledge-rings (I think Justin Bieber might have signed up once, which shows you how effective the whole thing really was), but my irony detector recorded nary a blip over the three-four minutes of Brennan’s track. I guess he thinks it really does.
It turns out that ‘True Love Waits’ was a pleasant aberration, as Brennan much prefers the strummy, hangdog singer-songwriter-who’s-frustrated-in-love shtick, which is a shame, as this places him in an overcrowded field, and he displays neither the voice, instrumental chops or lyrical wit to stand out very far. Songs like ‘Drunken Stroll’ (does anyone stroll these days? Didn’t strolling go out with Noel Coward?) are pretty tedious by any standards and the EP could have lost its last two tracks without pain on anyone’s part. Better instances of the genre include ‘Stay With Me Tonight’ and ‘When I Told You I Loved You’, in which producer Tom Loffmann builds on Brennan’s delicate acoustic stylings, layering on some attractive melodeons and pianos to add a warm, lived-in, let’s-bung-in-a-spinet-I-found-in-my-Grandpa’s-attic quality you sometimes hear in Aimee Mann’s best work. The latter track in particular conjures an exhausted, small-hours atmosphere that easily triumphs over the dime-a-dozen romantic lyrics. It’s a tune that merits a better story.
In summary, ‘True Love Waits’ is an unbalanced but sporadically pretty record that needs a bit more zip and vigour and a bit less poor-me sentimentality, but if Brennan can liven things up a bit, I promise I’ll get the next write-up done in under three months. How’s that?