Songdog ‎- The Time Of Summer Lightning (2005)

Songdog are really all about the songs; dark, literate songs sung from the prison-cell of the heart (from where you can sometimes see just as far as from the top of any mountain). This is hushed, candlelit punk rock – acoustic music with a strap-on.

“And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” – the closing lines of Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby nail the brooding heart of this record perfectly, a dark and poignant collection of songs about dreams gone wrong, loves left behind, new lusts and old obsessions. Loss and Time Past haunt this beautiful album like muffled footfalls in an empty old house.

For Lyndon, if it’s not about poetry (the shorthand of the heart) and great tunes it’s probably just a career move. In earlier bands, Lyndon used to yelp his stuff in front of Marshall-stacks and big fuck-off bass-bins, but with Songdog he changed tack and sold his gold-top Les Paul for a Martin. There’s as much attitude in his songs as ever, only now it’s murmured sotto voce.

Lyndon reveres Leonard Cohen, James Joyce, Joni Mitchell, Samuel Beckett, Tom Waits, Marcel Proust, Bob Dylan and Emile Cioran best (plus Roy Orbison and Franz Kafka, the Beatles and Baudelaire). As commented by Uncut, Songdog’s “dislocated, defiant and erotic songs echo [their] principal influences – Brel, the Beat poets, Dylan, Leonard Cohen – without compromising the often startling originality of [their] own vision.”