(A24 Music)
Haunting harmonica and poetic banality add to the Londoner’s spookily sonorous baritone to create a hypnotically familiar yet ineffably fresh album
F
ilm and TV powerhouse A24 bridges the gap between the cutting-edge and the commercial: their content dominates the cultural conversation, often with help from amusingly gimmicky merch (the Midsommar incense burner, the Uncut Gems basketball). Judging by their in-house record label’s first signing, this isn’t a model they’re bringing to their music ventures: it’s very hard to imagine the gritty, lugubrious, bathos-steeped tunes of south-east Londoner Mark William Lewis lassoing the zeitgeist, let alone lending themselves to a quirky product tie-in. (A vial of filthy Thames water, perhaps?)
Yet one spin of Tomorrow Is Perfect, the lead single from Lewis’s second album, and it’s instantly obvious why any corporate arbiter of cool would trip over themselves to sign him. An exquisitely beautiful dirge that unites the Durutti Column’s bright, sad slashes of guitar with the plodding, cleanly produced indie of Parachutes-era Coldplay under Lewis’s almost spookily sonorous baritone, it is narcotically familiar and ineffably fresh, a combination of post-ironic simplicity and hyper-sophisticated taste.
