*Gratitudes* is a solo album in the strictest sense. The songs, the arrangements in Logic Pro, the mix, the master and the sleeve (a sun-bleached photograph of a road, a railing and a canopy of trees, labelled simply "Walk") are all the work of a single pair of hands. This is the sort of self-sufficiency that usually produces either a masterpiece or a mess. Happily, it produces something rarer: a record with a clear temperament, and a pleasingly unguarded one.
The subject is thankfulness, which is not the stuff of most rock records. Rock prefers grievance, swagger and the fine art of the sneer. appetiteapple goes the other way and traces the awkwardness of saying "thank you" from the schoolyard to adulthood, and the idea that gratitude is a muscle you train over years. It could have curdled into greeting-card sentiment. Instead the record plays it straight, with a sincerity that feels almost radical. Noel Gallagher built a career on the anthem that tells you everything will be alright. appetiteapple is quieter and arguably braver, writing the anthem that tells you to look up and acknowledge whoever got you here.
"Hello To Strangers" is the centrepiece and the clearest statement of purpose. Its imagery is that of a walker cresting a green hill, the village spread out below, the sense that somebody down there is expecting you. It is the sound of anticipation rather than arrival, and the track keeps that feeling alive to the final bar, greeting the unknown with what the artist calls strange delight. Britpop's best choruses always had a little ache folded inside the joy, and this one understands the trick. It is the kind of song you could imagine drifting from a car window on a motorway verge, which, given the sleeve, seems to be the point.
"Matter Of Decision" provides the necessary spine. Where the opener opens its arms, this one squares its shoulders. Its mood is all resolve, a commanding piece of music about willpower that never tips into bluster. The record understands that gratitude and strength are cousins, that it takes some nerve to admit what you owe other people. Pulp understood that vulnerability could be a form of swagger, and this track arrives at a similar conclusion by a different road.
What lifts *Gratitudes* above the pile of competent homage is its refusal to treat nostalgia as a costume. The 90s reference points are there in the melodic generosity and the unembarrassed love of a big, singable shape, but the record never sounds like a museum piece. It sounds like somebody who loves this music deeply and has found, in its grammar, a way to say something personal. The occasionally home-built charm of the whole enterprise only helps. A record this sincere would be diminished by too much polish.
There is a lesson here for the committee-written, focus-grouped end of the pop business. A year of solitary work, one artist and one idea, can yield something more coherent than any boardroom could commission. appetiteapple retains every share of the credit and, one suspects, every share of the pleasure.
*Gratitudes* will not rearrange the furniture of popular music, and it has no ambition to. It does something more useful: it sends you out of the door in a better mood than you came in. Put it on, take a long walk, and say thank you to somebody on the way back. Four and a half stars.