Alex Highton was in Mohanski.  I loved Mohanski.  I described them as a guilty pleasure but it was more pleasure than guilt.  I love Alex Highton – several thousand MySpace viewers can’t be wrong.  A good turn out, sound venue for this sort of act.  His laid back approach is perfectly suited to the laid back leather sofas and real ale.  It’s not cutting edge, it’s not supposed to be, it IS quality singer-song writer material without the whine that makes so much sing songwriter material unpleasant.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21EjQ7zdKfY&feature=channel

http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=50623511&blogId=511674203

Before I tell you why you should buy it (currently download only but I believe on physical soon) I should tell you why it may well be very successful outside of it’s many integral marvels.  Someone Twittered Alex to Aston Kutcher and he did another SuBo on him.  Although he isn’t yet leaving his house to flashbulbs he got 60,000 MySpace hits overnight after this and must surely be looking at some interesting offers.  Probably as well he had an albums worth ready before “advice” could cloud his vision.  And that vision is something that I can confirm as a Great British Album.

The Woodditon Wives Club exists in an idyll not a long ramble from the Village Green Preservation Society, though perhaps a little more cosmopolitan (and with the odd retired geezer).  It takes humour and love (of his new – and real – village life, Wife and Family) and furnishes an organic setting that grows with each listen.  It starts slightly darkly with the allegorical tale of “Village Life” (a hint of Blind Faith’s Can’t Find My Way Home although overall the “get it together in the country” of Traffic is more appropriate), portents of change make him unsure of his move from City to Country.  A more literal version of the move is on the decidedly Ray Davies “I Left The City”, although the verses could apply to drug addiction as easily as country addiction, a pastoral Guy Richie plot.  In fact the album flits between the gently self critical and the sigh of relief that comes with the country air.  It’s far from a concept album but perhaps a collection of short stories that wouldn’t be out of place on the Transatlantic label.  Mention of that label makes this a reasonable place to interject that the acoustic guitar work throughout is superb.

“We’ll All Have Fun” rolls in on the old joanna like Bowie’s Pretty Things and is another vignette of small time crime.  “Little Rocks” eschews the story-telling for a fairly straight (albeit Pink Floyd referencing) love song.  Utter simplicity.  But utter simplicity is very difficult to attain.  “Smoking” suggests the Darling Buds in Al’s May are the sort that pop in your spliff.  Not altogether serious, as the feigned memory loss verse implies.  As it is almost impossible to review music without mentioning possible points of reference I’d say Bugsy Malone might have been viewed before the gin house shuffle of “I Started Dropping”.

http://tr.im/kqqv

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