The likeable, powerful tenor-voiced, 30-year-old singer-songwriter from North Shields has hit mainstream success, especially with his last LP, Seventeen Going Under (2021), and while this continues with a sometimes Springsteen-like style, there’s a lyrical melancholy colouring this third LP, on trappings of fame, music industry, and tales of tragedy within his northern working-class roots. The strong opener and title track has that instant broad-appeal sound and road-movie style of The Boss, but darker songs are afoot in such songs as Chin Up, describing a young couple in a “one-horse town” who “can’t heat the place for fucking love nor money”. It is where Fender gets angrier, his Geordie vowels come out, and he then traverses the mainstream barrier. Across a foreboding sheen of synths and drums on TV Dinner he has a powerful, articulate jab at music industry and media hypocrites who “fetishise struggling” and portrays a tragic pattern: “The market before anything/ The darkest days are yet to sing/ Like Winehouse, she was just a bairn / They love her now but bled her then/ They reared me as a class clown/ Grass-fed little cash cow/ I cashed out, headed hellbound / And now they point and laugh.” Something Heavy has an easy country-pop sound, but touches on serious social problems hitting his childhood town - depression (“So many good people falling victim to the dog”). Influenced perhaps by Lindisfarne, he explores folkier styles on Wild Long Lie and Reign Me In, the latter having warm piano and saxophone singalong style but with lyrics such as “And I'm, I'm stood here chewing everybody's lugs off / Telling everybody how much I fucked it up / And I'm working myself up to a nice, warm bliss / All my memories of you ring like tinnitus.” But perhaps the biggest highlight, and the closer, is Remember My Name, which soars beautifully with brass backing from the Easington Colliery brass band, and his a moving tribute to his grandma, her deteriorating memory due to dementia: “So humour me, make my day / I'll tell you stories, I'll kiss your face / And I'll pray you'll remember my name.” A rare talent, and unusual success story, who can fill stadiums with big choruses and approachable mainstream sounds , but also isn’t afraid to shine a torch on the nitty-gritty dark side of the underprivileged tenement houses of modern life. Out on Polydor.
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