Watercolor

‘Postcards’ is the second album from weird and brilliant West Yorkshire trio The Housekeeping Society, following 2011’s oddball debut, ‘This Way to Power’. If you’ve heard that album, or been lucky enough to catch one of their mesmerising live sets, you’ll have some idea what you’re in for. If not... well, describing them might be a bit tricky. They’re not normal, you see, the Housekeepers. Quite aside from their decidedly odd moniker, they produce music that pings with wit and invention, bounding gleefully from one musical style to another whilst never losing focus on a sound that is, distinctly, and for want of a better word... Housekeepy. You might want to call it folk music: earthy, organic tones dominated by guitar, piano and ukelele, breathing in time with the yearnings of its characters. But then these are also pop songs, with canny, vibrant hooks and melodies that seep unnoticed into the background chatter of your mind and hum away all day. We start with a journey to the seaside, as opening track The Coast Is Clear builds a rhythm around the chugging of a steam train that develops into a wide-eyed, playful hymn to the joys of getting away from it all. From this point on we will never be far from the beach, swooping through the lives of holidaymakers, locals, bed and breakfast owners and seafarers, as the fortunes of the holiday industry ebb and swell through the years. The tone shifts from Shot through all this, like letters through a stick of rock, is a real sense of time and place. The album tastes of salt and candy-floss, thanks in no small part to the layering of location recording from the North Coast, often sequenced into the rhythms of the tracks by percussionist Ivan Mack. There are two or three tracks that stand out quite quickly. End Of The Pier is energetic and poppy, with a frenzied electronic bass-line under swooping strings and a soaring lead vocal by Ric Neale that would make Morten Harket’s ears prick up. The plaintive, delicate voice of Spencer Bayles, meanwhile, lends an ethereal sadness to You, Me And The Swell Of The Sea. Most moving of all, and for this reviewer the highlight of the album, is the Neale penned Still. In this ballad we hear the prayers of a woman widowed by the sea, wondering how the God who moves over the face of the water could let it happen. A powerful lyric over a haunting piano signature, the song burrows deeper with every listen. vaudevillian whimsy (Seaside Mystery Man) to wistful melancholy (the achingly beautiful Ghosts), taking in romance, nostalgia and even a little social commentary along the way.

There are many other treasures here. Suitcase is either funny or heartbreaking depending on your mood, as the titular item of luggage laments an increasingly one-sided love affair with its owner. And closing track The Seaside’s Been Shut Down sees nothing wrong with being both sing-a-long melodic perfection and a terribly sad curtain drawn on the world we have been celebrating.

“From this point on we will never be far from the beach, swooping through the lives of holidaymakers, locals, bed and breakfast owners and seafarers, as the fortunes of the holiday industry ebb and swell through the years.”

The whole album, in fact, plays on the tension between the joy of the present and the pain of the past, finding both beauty and sadness in the fading world of the sea front. This is reflected not only in the

carefully crafted lyrics and eclectic instrumentation, but also in the gorgeous cover art. Created by Jean McEwan and Robert Hope, the sleeve design evokes in image what the album does in sound: seaside landscapes, slipping out of focus into abstract, pastel memory. On the cover a childlike scribble of a house soars through the air, carried by zeppelin over a defocused seafront. Hope and bittersweet nostalgia at the same time, Postcards is something to write home about.

Rob Reed

For more information about The Housekeeping Society visit www.thehousekeepingsociety.com