Tom McRae - King of Cards
Monday, 19 February 2007. Music.
I don't normally write about music, but Tom McRae is different. He is perhaps one of British music's best kept secrets. Tom McRae is a singer-songwriter from Suffolk. He's been compared to the music of Nick Drake and Tim Buckley, and his self-titled debut album was nominated for the a Brit Award and the Mercury Music Prize in 2001.
I find his lyrics simply incredible, mixing love, death, fear, modernity, pain, hatred, and rather surprisingly the pointlessness of song writers, into folk-rock. Acoustic guitars, the occasional string quartets, pianos, weird synth sounds, xylophones and whatever else seems to fit the song appear and disappear, whilst Tom's voice glides over the top.
If you've seen my short film The Detective, the closing music is Sao Paulo Rain, by Tom. Quite how a song about the poverty of Latin America and a biblical plague fits in with a Neo-Noir detective film set in London I didn't really worry about, I simply wanted to use some of McRae's music.
His new album King of Cards is released at the end of April, but visitors to his site can stream the entire album right now. I have been listening to it over the weekend, and another suburb work. Even if you have never heard any of his other albums it's well work a listen, and like his other albums I think this one is going to be another of the gems that I'll have in my music collection, that you can pull out and listen to when you want to feel like you really "know" about music. You can catch up with some of his other songs with a selection being streamed as last.fm.
It was my brother Mark who introduced me to Tom McRae, and as Mark has been away in South Africa for a little over a month now, I am starting to miss him, listening to the new album made me think of him.
One of my favourite tracks, is Karaoke Soul, which Tom described in the following quote:
"Every aspect of our society and culture has now been reduced to a competition with pre-determined results, much like American elections. Pop music is an interactive soap opera, TV and newspapers are celebrity court circulars telling us what the new Kings and Queens of light entertainment are up to now. And chief Pop Idol himself, Tony Blair, learns a new dance routine every week, hoping we won't notice he's re-hashing the same old tunes. Yes it's all bright and breezy stuff that none of us should get too worked up about. After all, weren't The Monkees manufactured? Fuck off, you're a twat."