Robinson - Beneath The Ballroom (2011)

I love his voice and the songs themselves as individuals are all good- they just feel like they dont belong together on an album. The first track sounds like a hindu chant like some unearthly deity music Mr Popular, then the swagger of without love, the brashness of Im leaving, the suede dog man star era sound of 'Receipt for my heart' feels like a series of starters for what is literally the most astonishing song of the 20th and 21st centuries "Never be her'. The song sounds like a bar room song that cowboys sang in the wild west, that the celts bawled in their blackhouses, and the Romans sung drunk and exhilirated before battle. Its like the pogues on steroids with a shot of pre roman britishness soaked in. This is a song about britishness, not in its content but in its posture. It is a primal call to arms, to the acceptance of the hellishness of life, a consumption of tragedy, a mocking jeer at panic and fear to an astonishing structure. If Robinson pulled a whole album off like this one song he would have the next 'Never mind the bollocks' on his hands. The cover for BTB depicts robinson on a grounded fairground in the dust, lets start pinning your darkness to the wall on the next album and get off those machines of treachery and impotence.~Richard Simmons