With two critically acclaimed albums under his belt – ‘My Beautiful Demon’ and ‘Spoonface’ – it wouldn’t be a surprise if we should find Ben Christophers in a particularly positive and buoyant frame of mind on new album ‘The Spaces In Between’ and lo and behold we do. Even Christophers himself describes it as the most ‘upbeat and optimistic record’ he’s ever written. No mean feat for a man dropped recently by those major dingbats at former label V2. The fact he’s been picked up just as swiftly by those canny cooks at Cooking Vinyl should however offer some explanation of his surprising resilience. Surprising because Christophers is ordinarily the kind of fellow who thanks a rapturous comeback welcome from his audience with the words, “It doesn’t change anything, I’m still nervous”. And it’s this courteous but fragile ego that simialrly defines this album: a little bit shy, a little bit withdrawing, a little bit odd, but approached with the sensitivity it quietly requests the record surrenders a gift of staggering beauty and conviction with album opener ‘Flowers Drink Upon The Ground’ setting the tone for Christophers’ idiosyncratic raking over of nature and all its cruel quibbling contradictions and absurdities:
“And still I don’t understand why a bee stings and dies/And yet it’s wasps I hate”
And yet it’s from this same unscrupulous wilderness that Christophers derives so much relief from his own crass melancholy and finds some measure of order. The wobbly, rubbery and effervescent ‘Good Day For The Hopeless’ illustrates this just fine: its lazy, irresolute hero ‘dialling zeros’ in an effort to be heard. ‘Everybody Stood To See Us’ is a similar case in point with Christophers paddling friskily through a spacey, glittering stream of consciousness. And though tracks like these please enough, it’s the unearthly delight of tender acoustic ballads like ‘River Songs’ and the immensurable sweetness of ‘The Drinking Tree’ – a song that recalls the swirling lullaby prettiness of Radiohead’s ‘No Surprises’ and it’s dark, eerie counterpart ‘Street Spirit’ without suggesting anything by way of imitation – that makes this album a singular and significant treat. With a voice pitched somewhere between Thom Yorke, Rod Stewart and Mick Hucknall, it’s hardly surprising that the ‘Radiohead’ parallel gets drawn – a voice that is in equal measures, tender, aching, consoling and frightfully elastic – but it’s really where the parallel ends. It’s enigmatic, not stigmatic and nowhere do you sense Christophers floundering in a misery of his own making – even if the wild flower bouquet of the Cotswolds never seems very far away from our noses.
Written and recorded predominantly on guitar and percussion between the Summer of 2003 and early 2004, the album marks the first time Ben has worked with friend and engineer/co-producer Cenzo Townshend (Graham Coxon, Blur, Datsuns, Cranberries, Echo & The Bunnymen) as opposed to long time collaborator David Kosten of Faultline. The result is a pastoral, lyrically vigorous, handcrafted record rarely venturing beyond the sound of a babbling brook and the spaces in between.
Ben, come out from under that bushell……