Martin Craft Silver & Fire by: Steve Scully Tue:25-Sep-07 Label: 679 Recordings Year: 2007 WB rating 82 out of 100

Martin Craft has been hailed as the next Elliott Smith by some, and the comparisons are readily seen. Apart from the obvious similarities such as his quiet, controlled vocals, it’s the way he manages to weave his deepest thoughts into often-beautiful, transcendent pop melodies that immediately grabs your attention, just as it did when Smith was at his peak.

If there’s a distasteful element to Silver & Fire it’s that, at times, it resembles a rather lame ‘white-boy’ attempt at soulful funk. ‘You Are The Music’ especially exhibits this, as it does everything but Wah-Wah itself into retro-70’s cheesy soul music, and Craft’s straight-as-can-be approach to vocals does nothing to either alleviate the pain nor play upon the genre. It’s on the quiet, acoustic numbers that Craft’s often double-tracked vocals find their niche. On ‘I Got Nobody Waiting For Me’ he may sound a little like Jose Gonzalez, but he drifts through the guitar and banjo-laced piece like Nick Drake, deftly and subtly.

Sweet and never overwhelming, Craft’s vocals complement the quieter, shadowy landscape of his songwriting; from the chorus harmonies of ‘Love Knows How To Fight’ to his readiness to take second-fiddle to a guest female vocalist, he knows his practical limitations and has the nous to work around them.

‘Sweets’ is adorned with the vocal talent of Sarah Cartwright, whose haunting vocals build on the tightly-knit folk-pop ballad as she sings in her most seductive tone: “I take sweets from strangers.” Craft manages to meld fables of the more tainted, dark sides of humanity such as ‘Sweets’ with common conundrums like that of ‘Emily Snow’: the existential crisis, “In the blink of an eye/We’re all gonna die/So why are we waiting for tomorrow?” It’s the darker moments like this that the Elliott Smith comparison is at its most lucid, hidden under gorgeous, catchy pop melodies are complex, confronting themes not often approached by Craft’s pop counterparts.

Craft mixes the sinister with the uplifting, both musically and lyrically. His equal, yet quite separate abilities to create both palatable pop melodies and present imagery that is often as far removed from this pleasantry so as to be downright depressing. In ‘Teardrop Tattoo’ he illustrates a landscape “where men hid in the shadows, of silhouetted girls,” and evokes images of debauchery and hopelessness: “And he came for your life/In the rain, in the night/All he ever cried over you/Was a teardrop tattoo.” Poetic, and perhaps inspired by the “rusty tear” on the cheek of Yodeling Elaine in Tom Waits’ ‘Circus’. On par with the murder ballads and tales of loss, however, are Craft’s more uplifting love songs. ‘The Soldier’, the most effective of these, on the face of it a story of a soldier thinking of the love he left behind, repeats potent, honest lyrics throughout: “what I would do fro your love.”

Martin Craft may have initially begun his music career in the realm of psychedelia with Sidewinder, but he has definitely found his calling in the tangible world. Silver & Fire is Craft delving as deeply into his own heart as he does the hearts of his characters and subjects; like his heroines, we all embody both victim (‘Sweets’, ‘Teardrop Tattoo’) and victor (‘Snowbird’), hopeless and hopeful, despair and ecstasy. For the most part utterly convincing, Silver & Fire offers us a view of the polarity of our world, but with a sense of the inextricability of each extreme from the other: just as we can easily see the victim as perpetrator in their own right, we can see hopelessness emerge from extreme hope, and that sadness is so often born from miscalculated joy.