Steven Adams and The French Drops - Keep It Light (2020)

As a Newmarket resident in the 2000s, the Broken Family Band were very much our local musical heroes. They were the late-night, national radio indie rock darlings who remained delightfully accessible and just underground enough to be a fantastic secret you could reveal to the uninitiated. As much as they could perform to 500 in a venue like the Cambridge Junction, they were equally happy to play the Palomino pub in Newmarket to a handful of punters. You could rely on this band to entertain, there were always plenty of self-effacing laughs (as you’d expect from an outfit who came up with album titles like ‘Welcome Home Loser’) but an abundance of quality song-writing always underpinned the revelry. In fact, in the early days, I wasn’t entirely sure that their motivation wasn’t merely to present themselves as a fake, irreverent Alt-Country band, largely thanks to the dodgy American accent Steven Adams used to effect (something which only partially disappeared with time). This was a band who were making seriously good music but not taking themselves too seriously at all, quite a rare mixture really.

I wrote enthusiastically about the Broken Family Band after a couple of triumphant performances at the Cambridge Folk Festival in 2006. At that moment, it seemed entirely probable that they were about to make the step up into wider critical recognition, larger audiences, feature on mainstream radio playlists and the like. But things didn’t quite pan out that way and by the end of the decade they knocked it all on the head, the majority of members presumably continuing with the day jobs that they had refused to give up during the band’s heyday. On this latest solo album, their frontman Steven Adams seems to be addressing this very scenario directly on the song ‘Note To Self’. It’s a hypnotic piece of chugging folk-rock with a motoric Krautrock-like insistence where Adams muses that “when I was younger I wanted to make my mark; as I made my mark I found more pleasure in the making than in the marks”. He may well identify his approach as showing a “lack of ambition”, but he is right to celebrate this rather than mourn his disposition. It is the very thing that made his former band so wonderful and has continued thereafter through various solo incarnations. Steven Adams has always made damn sure he is writing good songs above all other peripheral concerns; he never chases after audiences or the kind of excessive exposure that he would have no interest in entertaining anyway.

Today Adams is beginning to occupy an honourable place in the singer-songwriter community, alongside such luminaries as Jeffrey Lewis and Half Man Half Biscuits Nigel Blackwell. Like them, he has the knack of writing sharp, biting songs that expose themselves as detailed portraits on the minutiae of modern life and he can lacerate his compositions with copious moments of wit and wisdom. Musically too he has never put any limits on his evolution. The nuts and bolts of his albums are folk-rock played by indie sympathisers for sure, but that is merely a starting point. Three songs in on this LP and The French Drops have boiled up ‘Canary’ (in which Adams asks, “if this is the comedown when was the high?”) into a cacophony of dissonant saxophone and scratchy guitar aggression. At the other end of the scale, ‘Oh Dear’ begins as a gentle rocking chair country strum, the lightly brushed drums and finely picked electric guitar patterns holding the scene together as Adams croons his comically sarcastic sounding “ooh dear” refrain.

That easy way Adams has of cooking up a memorable pop chorus is still burning bright. ‘Bring On The Naps’ is a delightful little ode to the joy of taking a snooze, complete with children singing backing on the later choruses. ‘Going To Everglades’ is similarly uplifting, literally on a song that starts in an airport and musically bounces with the expectation of impending travel adventures. Then, as always, the inner dialogue emerges, and our narrator is asking “what are we going to do there? I mean it’s a country where they fry people” before rationalising “still I want to bring back a baseball cap, sneakers and a guitar from ‘57”. He’s an ever-quotable writer, I could rummage through the lyrics on this record and pick out a multitude of examples to tempt you in. I mean, if a title like ‘My Brother The Racist’ doesn’t prick your curiosity then I’ll throw in the spoiler that the last lyrics heard on the album are “I found the last patch of sunlight in the city, I saved it on my phone”.