The Dreaming Spires “Normal Town”

Pretty melodies and bleak landscapes combine on this grounded album.

“It’s my home, I suppose,” sings Robin Bennett on the title track, which opens the third Dreaming Spires album. It’s about Didcot, the in-between town in the South of England between Oxford and London. Over a dozen tracks, melancholy lyrics are sugared with major-key melodies sung by Bennett in a fragile voice somewhere between Jeff Tweedy and Wayne Coyne.

Many of the songs describe Didcot’s status as a town out of time. ‘21st Century Light Industrial’ is possibly the hookiest song to criticise the prevalence of warehouses and industrial parks, while ‘Cooling Towers’ is anchored by an emphatic bassline that underscores complaints about deindustrialisation. ‘Normalisation’ borrows its rhythmic feel from ‘Baba O’Riley’ by The Who and harmonies from Big Star or Teenage Fanclub, with a nod in the lyrics to men being “replaced by robots…can we start the resistance?”

‘Faraway Blue Skies’ has the wooziness of Mercury Rev, with a ringing guitar and reverb-soaked piano chords. The latter is also present on both ‘Linescapes’, another song with a nagging chorus in a major key, and ‘Where I’m Calling From’, which includes an elegiac instrumental passage. ‘These Days Will End’, which encourages a meeting on the waterfront, builds impressively too and offers much-needed light to an album full of shade, optimism mixed with resignation.

On ‘Stolen Car’, music and the open road offer the solution for a protagonist with the “worn-out soul”, as Bennett sings mournfully of how “every move is ‘you lose’ and every song is the blues”. ‘Coming Home’ uses congas and egg shaker percussion, as well as an electronic pulse, to draw attention to words about “sands in an hourglass” and “magic in the mess you make”.

Closing track ‘Real Life’ offers a happy ever after: “I put my faith in you just like you wanted me to…I don’t wanna waste my life”. Life will not be wasted listening to this album, which offers social realism and grown-up reflections. It might not shift as many units as Sam Fender’s latest album, but it is a useful contribution to the genre of music that tries to take the pulse of Great Britain using the rudiments of rock.