Songs From The Deep Forest - Duke Special

...a thoroughly charming collection of songs for this, his first album; "Songs From The Deep Forest". From the knees-up piano of "Portrait" through the epic orchestration of "Freewheel", towards the slightly banal "Slip Of A Girl" and then once back round again, the songs here are chirpy, pleasant, and owe quite a debt to Wings-era McCartney.. Melody takes precedence over noise, and the result is an album that garnered itself a Mercury Music Award Nomination, ...
...is. Simply put: the good songs are good, and the bad songs are bad. There's little in the way of middle ground here. Luckily, the good outnumbers the bad, especially when tracks such as "Everybody Wants A Little Something" come round. A plinky-plonky piano toetapper, it starts out relentlessly upbeat until Duke starts singing in his husky Irish voice, "I don't love you/everybody knows", which is a bit of a downer. However, the song itself, punctuated ...

Seresecros 06.12.2007 · Read full review
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Review of Songs From The Deep Forest - Duke Special

...name a few. Songs from the deep forest is Special's second album after May 2005 "Adventures in Gramophone - which was itself an amalgamation of two earlier EPs. The two albums share a number of tracks in common, namely "freewheel", "wake up scarlett" and "last night I nearly died" The first Duke song I heard was "freewheel" and I was captivated it it had been a long time since I had heard something different and it piqued my interest. Sounding like ...
...As for the other songs on the album there are upbeat ones such as Last night I nearly died and mellower ones (of which there are plenty!) put in mind of songs from the first album. The album benefits from a bigger production budget with swooping orchestral sequences which sound stunning - Duke Special are what Keane want to be when they grow up. Duke's songs sound powerful yet fragile and for some strange reason make me think of abandoned ruins ...

shelleybird 02.02.2007 · Read full review
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Review of Songs From The Deep Forest - Duke Special