Four songs, no filler, no showing off. That restraint is the record’s real achievement. James could easily have padded this out, given that he’s reportedly stockpiled over three hundred songs in the past two years, but he’s chosen instead to offer a tight, considered opening statement, and the discipline shows. ‘Pound of Flesh’, the lead single, sets the tone: a chugging, Gallagher-shaped chorus wrapped around lyrics that refuse melodrama even while describing genuine collapse. James sings about being ground down by circumstance the way a man describes a scar rather than the wound \u2014 matter-of-fact, a little rueful, entirely without self-pity.<\/p>
That’s the trick running through the whole EP: warmth applied to hard subjects. ‘Walking Through Hell’ could, in lesser hands, tip into the maudlin, but the arrangement keeps things buoyant, acoustic strums and a rhythm section that refuses to wallow, so the song ends up sounding less like a eulogy for bad times and more like a pep talk delivered by someone who’s earned the right to give one. ‘Under The Clocks’ slows the pulse and lets James’s voice \u2014 grainy, unpolished, closer to Zach Bryan’s front-porch rasp than to anything studio-buffed \u2014 carry the weight instead. It’s the record’s most patient moment, and its best.<\/p>
The title track closes things out, and it’s here that James’s fatherhood songwriting finds its clearest expression: a promise dressed up as a chorus, sung to someone specific enough that you believe every word of it. Noel Gallagher’s melodic instincts are audible in the chord movement, Noah Kahan’s confessional directness in the phrasing, but James doesn’t sound like an impersonator working through his record collection. He sounds like a man who found those influences useful and then got on with telling his own story.<\/span><\/p> Patrick Carre and Simon Groves, producing and mixing at Artisan Studios, deserve credit for resisting the urge to varnish this into something glossier than it needs to be. The mastering at Studio 301 leaves enough grain in James’s voice that the emotional claims of the lyrics feel earned rather than performed. Indie-folk this straightforwardly sincere risks curdling into clich\u00e9, and James dodges that trap mostly by refusing to oversell any single moment \u2014 no key changes for the sake of it, no strings swelling in to cue the tears.<\/span><\/p> What you’re left with, fourteen minutes later, is a songwriter who treats ordinary hardship as worth documenting precisely because it’s ordinary \u2014 the daily grind of getting through, rather than the cinematic version of collapse and redemption. It’s a modest record in scope and an ambitious one in intent, four songs that function as a promise of a much longer catalogue still to come. On this evidence, that catalogue is worth waiting for.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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