Avant Gardner
Album: JoanLife
Label: It's Black
Tracks: 14
Website: https://www.reverbnation.com/avantgardner

I half-hoped this would be an offering from the long-forgotten act of the same name which appeared on the Virgin Records "Guillotine" 10-inch sampler in 1977, alongside X-Ray Spex, XTC and Poet and the Roots. It was not to be, however. Avant Gardner is a singer-songwriter from Liverpool, who has been performing and recording under the name for 14 years. He does a fine line in downbeat song titles: "The Wally Diet", "Panda-Eye Sunday" and "Never Too Late (To Turn Into a Dickhead)" being just three of the fourteen on offer (my personal favourite being "From MidRiff Central to MunterVille").

The keynote, as if you couldn't guess from the titles, is "sour", but not to the extent that the songs are overpoweringly depressing. There are echoes of Lloyd Cole and Richard Hawley, in the vocals, and if the drums are a bit intrusive on opening track "Hollywood Science", the other instrumentation (which I can only assume are also played by "Mr Gardner") comes together nicely. By the halfway stage, the album does tend to become a bit unrelenting, and I began to feel a bit voyeuristic, as if overhearing a long-running domestic. The relentlessness is emphasised to some extent by a tendency for the vocals to hover around the same notes for much of the album, and the rhyming schemes on some of the songs are a bit predictable.

I started out wanting to like this album. The production is a bit raw, as you might expect from a product of (mostly) one man in a home-studio, but I get the feeling that if he was working with a few more musicians to provide some variety to the material, Avant Gardner could bear more fruit.

Harry Thomson