Case Hardin – Colours Simple

Pete Gow and Case Hardin are fast carving out a place for themselves in the list of finest UK songwriters. Colours Simple is ambitious, headstrong and no holds-barred. It lacks bullshit and takes no quarter. It arrives in your speakers like a debut record, crackling with the energy of players in their teens or early twenties (a situation that for Gow et al has, alas, all but disappeared in the rearview mirror), but benefits from a mature perspective that weighs equal amounts of reflective honesty and resigned habit and judges both almost to perfection. Put simply, Colours.. is an exponential leap forward, and that’s from a point way up the scale already.

Gow has spoken in the past of the need to locate a theme, musically or lyrically, before writing begins. Their previous album, ‘PM’ rode the keening fiddle of guest and ex member Hana Piranha. The music flowed into and around its slipstream, sinuous folk-inspired tales for the dispossessed and lonely. Colours Simple switches lock, stock and two smoking pickups for Jim Maving’s six string. The overall sound has broadened. Previous boundaries have stretched. The sound is expansive, retro and modern at the same time. Woven into Gow’s stories are strands of fiction and lines of truth, flights of fancy; hard-luck heroes and barbed memories.

More than anything, this is a rock record, the way rock records used to be, rock as you figure it was in the early-to-mid ‘70s, when it was more about ensuring the blood, sweat and substance of the real stuff of life was hammered into the groove rather than polished out for fear of offending anyone. I repeat; it lacks bullshit and takes no quarter. If PM was the late night, whisky-addled and candle-lit come down, Colours Simple is the bright-lights, busy city prequel; brash, bolshie and brilliantly rendered in high-definition, the sober chat up line before the drunken fumble.

As opening gambits go, ‘Poets Corner’ is a scene-stealer. 8:22 of epic arrangement, from the kick-drum introduction and organ build, through Gow’s basement-low vocals to Mavings electrifying guitar lead and the roll and repeat of relentless words and guitar that follow, it’s a statement of intent that threatens to pull the rug from the rest of the album in a ‘how the fuck do you follow that?’ exclamation. Your initial view of ‘These Three Cities’ may reinforce this feeling, until you dig beneath its PM-like surface to the grit and crunch of Gow’s lyric – ‘I brought rain to three cities / That hadn’t seen it pour / She said since December last year / But she might have meant the year before’. It chugs along mid-tempo with the free-ranging feel of the best Van Morrison standards, where you’re not sure where the melody will take you next but you’re more than happy to let the tide drag you along.

If ‘These Three Cities’ is a grower, the next two are destined to be stone-cold classics before their first four bars are done. ‘Roll Damnation Roll’ and ‘(Jesus Christ Tomorrow Morning) Do I Still Have To Feel This Way?’ (the titles alone allude to the moxie on display) carry a controlled swagger last heard on the best Faces albums. Of all the vulgarities, perceived or otherwise, available to the human being, a well-articulated Jesus Christ still has the ability to provide a visceral thrill. When it’s allied to the punctuation of a well-timed drum fill in a song that roars out of the gate like a TVR with a sore throat, you can feel the hairs on your neck rise and the needle tip towards the red. Arriving as it does on the heels of the sing-along, hand-clap rhythm of ‘Roll Damnation Roll’ (complete with a great slide intro from Maving), it’s the second of a one-two punch that ensures ‘Poets Corner’ feels more like brilliant foreplay than an uncomfortably premature end to the evening.

Gow does world weary better than most and the second half of Colours.. has two fine examples. ‘Fiction Writer’ is a slow acoustic track supplemented with keys that unravels the power and failure of words when it most matters – ‘And words, words, words / Words that get away / The ones you can’t, the ones you won’t / Quite bring yourself to say / And these tiny little gestures / Still reveal so much / To say it all, with not much at all / It’s a fiction writer’s touch’. ‘High Rollers’ paints the life of a casino croupier in subdued shades of grey and black; there’s little hope and less luck in the Sisyphean climb towards the point at 2:07 when the song almost dies on its own lack of steam, but Gow soldiers on to give the story its moment in the sun. Piranha’s fiddle cradles the melody, dragging it to an inevitably muted end. Both share some of their DNA with PM; both are excellent.

In between, ‘Cheap Streaks From A Bottle’ takes a leaf out of the Soul revue, adding brilliant brass and a storming sax break to the mix. If Case Hardin takes this one live it’s going to tear the house down. ‘The Streets Are Where The Bars Are (The Bars Are Where The Girls Will Be)’ replaces the brass with some good time upright piano, another strong feature of various tracks, as Gow sings ‘We’re living in hope / Or at least, something like it’. There’s some great call and answer between Maving’s guitar and the piano (Mike Wesson’s key work is superb throughout) as the song tumbles headlong towards the end.

‘A Mention In Dispatches’ is single material, Maving’s riff the backbone for a song that shakes into second gear halfway through and careers off the road with raucous abandon before re-joining when the Devil’s climbed off its back. Before it ends it entertains a snippet of a Stones’ riff to show they’ve retained their sense of humour (there are musical references throughout, from ‘Summer’s here, and the time is right’ in ‘Poets Corner’ to the Shangri La’s Leader Of The Pack in ‘These Three Cities’). The album closes with ‘Another Toytown Morning’, a strummer that allows Gow a last opportunity to rake a few sad coals before the fire dies, reveling in heroes of the past – ‘An airless room and a bottle of wine / A turntable and some old Patsy Cline / Open up these scars / With pedal steel guitars / Lost to the lonesome and high’.

Come the revolution, all music will be made this way; with heart and head, honesty and vigor, as if it means something. Colours Simple is immediate and lasting, a great big bar-room brawl of an album where the pugilists roll up their sleeves and shake your hand before taking you down.

Turn it on, crank it up, down your shot and wade in.