Simplicity is often its own reward; a fact almost certainly overlooked by the average nail biting, genre-straddling and button-busting thirty-something rock icon. But it’s not just them; it’s you and me also. As sure as eggs is eggs, you, like me, will probably take occasional refuge in complexity and obscurity, compiling anthologies of dubious intellectual merit rather than tackle the basic pangs of our ordinary and unremarkable lives where, contrary to our expectations, often lies a surfeit of practical material; it may not always be good material, but certainly enough for a sandwich. Whether it’s bouncing up and down on the bed or trying to tie your shoelace children understand the profundity of the simplest joy and the gruelling demands of the most straightforward of tasks respectively. Put it this way; trying to conceive a briefer history of time is fine so long as you’ve already passed an hour watching the hands on your Wallace and Gromit Alarm Clock or held your breath for up to a minute. The older we get the less we feel, the less we feel the more we know, the more we know the less we look, the less we look the more we’re certain of never knowing, so take that and party. Our intellectual aspirations are ironically locked in ever decreasing circles.
The brief put forward by Jof and Peter of The Boy Least Likely To appears to run like this: rewind a little bit; take a good look at the things you’ve stopped looking at and have a crack at the things you’ve stopped doing for fear of social estrangement or embarrassment. Ideally speaking you should whip a balloon out of your pocket, blow it up and hit the nearest person to you over the head with it. Not too hard a task to tackle, surely?
Against a rainbow of primary-colours, juvenile graphics and a preponderance of nursery school concerns like fur, spiders, paper-cuts, warm panda cola, pillows and copious amounts of hugging together with a modicum of help from their chums on recorder and fiddle, the whimsical Buckinghamshire duo daub a gentle crayola spectacle of sparkling and very English eccentricity; like Lemon Jelly without the pith-taking and the samples.
Fans of lo-fi will enjoy the brutally naïve DIY production credits whilst the bespectacled, literary elite are likely to glaze over and die at the gentle word-play and wit barely concealed beneath the album’s fundamental subject matter and pre-school diversions; a philosophy of innocents crafted from play-dough, riddled with sultanas and occasionally dark as it is sweet. Like a four year old trying to explain the foremost articles of social injustice with only a large brush, a bag of coloured beans and a four-year old’s vocabulary at his disposal, it wrestles with logic in much the same way some folks scrap with crocodiles; it sounds foolish enough to start with, but look closer and it yields a considerable degree of substance. Looking for directions? Start at The Magic Numbers, turn left at Red Box, proceed forward to Half Cousin and stop at The Beatles White Album.
Tuneful, uplifting, and as English as a bagful of plums and damsons, The Boy Least Likely To have realised the dream of every child and turned base-metal into delicious candy-pop without once skimping on the floss. And right bloody wonderful it tastes too. The band will be supporting James Blunt this Autumn.
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