One More Grain - 'Isle of Grain' (White Heat) Released 28/01/2008

It’s hard to know what to make of One More Grain’s new long player, ‘Isle of Grain’; situated some place south of jazz in the street semantics of ‘spoken word’, it’s less jazz, more crass, dependent of course on your view on the whole ‘spoken word’ thang. Spoken word is currently gaining a fair bit of press, if we’re not subjected to Guardian ramblings about George Pringle’s own brand of cultural pretension (we love a bit of cultural pretentiousness here at Gigwise), then we’ve got every Tom/Dick journalist in the country namedropping The Fall and John Cooper Clarke; and now we have One More Grain coming up the builder’s entrance with ‘Isle of Grain’.

The thing with spoken word is that it’s either something people ‘get’ or they don’t. It doesn’t need to be particularly insightful; when has something supposedly ‘of the people’ been metaphorically minded (you only have to look to Jon McClure’s blasé assumptions about the - so called - working class to see that those making these statements couldn’t really give two shits about their subjects)? Even with the jazz influenced backing, ‘Isle of Grain’ is what it is: Daniel Patrick Quinn making very banal observations about what is, essentially, nothing. Lyrics such as “Oh have a heart, nobody worth their salt believes in a blank canvas” (‘Confession Time’) don’t really enliven particularly lucid nor vivid metaphors. It’s hardly the street equivalent of Seamus Heaney or Don Paterson is it?

The problem with this album predominantly lies with the indifference of the individual tracks. There’s not an awful lot of depth to them, nothing to make you sit up sharply and take notice. The reoccurring themes appear to be about escaping from a city that the protagonist never really leaves; but lacking the lyrical and melodic brilliance that Markland Starkie provides in his Sleeping States persona -where the isolation of the city is used to a starker and sophisticated effect. ‘Isle of Grain’ essentially epitomises the emptiness of writing about nothing; it’s nihilistic in its methodology, being so without meaning that it becomes something else entirely. Maybe I am missing something essential here, but even William Blake saw the world in a grain of sand; here there’s literally nothing to see; just a vast musical landscape of emptiness.