Album: Tom McRae

Just Like Blood, DB

Tom McRae's debut album profited from arriving hot on the coat-tails of David Gray's White Ladder in 2000, surfing the resurgent appeal of the singer-songwriter mode all the way to a Mercury Prize nomination which rather flattered its modest accomplishments. On this follow-up, the kalimba sample which opens the first track "A Day Like Today" signals a step forward from that dour debut, at least in terms of the arrangements, which are primped and preened to the point where the songs seem straitjacketed by their attention. Not that he's exactly cheered up over the past couple of years, though: "In your hand all the colours you thought were kings/ At the turn of a card can just disappear," he observes gloomily, the first of a series of musings apparently designed to cast clouds over the brightest of countenances. McRae's clearly the kind of chap who frets if he's not unhappy, whose glass is always half empty: "And soon enough this will fade like the photograph of you and me"; "And every bridge we build we burn and never learn to swim" – these are the kind of lines that appear deep and aphoristic at first glance, but ultimately convey little beyond an emotional trope towards pessimism, that most conservative of singer-songwriter attitudes. Add to this the pronounced self-absorption and the result is a grimly pompous tranche of generic bedsit melancholia. Fine if you like that sort of thing, I suppose.