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Your support makes all the difference.Satellite crept into view last spring with their debut single, "Let Me Lighten Up the Load", a warm-spirited offer to a troubled girlfriend. The catchy blend of programmed squawks and trip-hop grooves hinted at a familiarity with modern music modes, while Jonny Green's weary, amused-but-apologetic delivery and interest in the psychological suggested there might be an Eels album or two in his record collection.
As with Eels' Mr E, Green in effect is Satellite: Fear of Gravity was, according to the credits, "written, sung, played, programmed, bashed and strummed" by him, with only minimal help from a few friends. Indeed, the album has a thematic focus and intensely personal viewpoint that could come only from a sole guiding intelligence. Green seems mainly concerned with shortcomings, with the fears and flaws and inabilities that stake out our emotional parameters, but no matter how deep his self-loathing runs, he always manages to channel it through a distinctly British sense of humour. His ear for the power of a sterling pop tune, meanwhile, puts a cheery face on even the bleakest of prospects.
The result is a series of epiphanic pop anthems streaked with droll self-pity. "I've done a lot of things other people regret," he observes over a sea of synth bubbles and quaint, Beatle-ish piano progression in "Out of Luck". "I've been wearing my brain way down in my underwear/ But with all my other problems it got pretty crowded down there." His main problem might be an inability to rein in his waspish tongue, judging by songs such as "Bubbles": one moment he's contemplating the pain of breakup in charming style – "I wanna be a fish, 'cause they got no feelings" – then suddenly he flips the metaphor around with a spiteful barb, "They got tiny little brains and a beautiful body/ Does it sound familiar? 'Cause it's just like you." Ouch!
Green captures the obsessional nature of attraction in a disarmingly offhand manner. His songs are full of fools for love, like the jolly masochist in "Baby it's You", celebrating his liaison with a psychopath; or the besotted convict in "Can You Hear the Sound?", writing to his girlfriend while "a 20-stone guy called Mary" makes eyes at him. But Satellite's psychological acuity is at its sharpest on the title track, another glorious pop anthem confronting the way we use addiction to cover up our fear of failure: "There's a million washed-up wannabes/ Who never were but who could have been/ Who lost their nerve, who made excuses/ Empty bottles are friends of losers." Judging by his impressive work here, Green has managed to put his own demons behind him; but not, I hope, too far behind.
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