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Dan Arborise - Around in Circles Don’t think Blunt or Morrison, Go down the Buckley, Drake route and you’re getting warmer.
All this nu-folkyness going on at the moment could give Arborise a real chance of breaking out of the low lit bars and local back rooms and into the glistening mainstream that is the ‘hit parade’. It could be a good thing - there’s gold in them thar record sales and you can make a very tidy pile then call it quits after one best selling album. Or it could be a bad thing – the intimacy fades and you find yourself slapped on a doughy acoustic love compilation taken from a Hugh Grant movie, get overplayed on commercial radio stations and piped through church P.A.s in wedding season. Either way, it’s a hazardous journey, especially when stars rise too quickly.
But Arborise’s calm nature, which is rubber-stamped all over this album, has enabled him to climb the ladder at his own pace. Through his classically trained musical roots and his days with pop punk outfit Playground (trivia: Playground were linked with Ricky Gervais who offered to manage them. But he soon disappeared and was last seen attempting a career on the comedy circuit) Arborise has gone with the flow and even found time to study physics in Edinburgh before heading to Devon.
Dan Arborise’s new album, Around In Circles has taken a bit of time to get right too. In his blog he describes the first cut as ‘a bit of a damp squib’ and after mastering it in an old stone roundhouse with the help of Label buddy Jon Hopkins and having a bit of trouble taking promo shots of himself (by himself for himself) the project was finally ready for our listening pleasure.
I can say it was worth the wait. We’re welcomed into Dan’s blissful world with the soothing sounds of the ocean, as an acoustic intro laps onto the shore. Let Me Be has that traveling man sound with Arborise’s soft-spoken voice reminiscent of a young John Martyn when the mumbling wasn’t so bad. Beauty Through Her Eyes possesses the uplifting tones of Teenage Fanclub (one of Arborise’s influences) and by around track five, Leaving It All Behind, you find yourself comfortably sat on a sandy dune overlooking the crisp atlantic sea, all wrapped up in a warm scarf!
One of the stand out tracks, Everything That You’ve Been Taught To Love Is A Lie, allows Dan to show off his guitar talent layering up and down the mood to a drifting solo as the haunting tracks and tricky Nicky Drakey melodies keep on coming. To The Sea and I Cannot Afford mound together into one continuation to keep your toes warm and in the final track, Flickers, a therapeutic piano sound drops like light rain on your face before the song tails off and you’re back in the room!
Overall it’s a well-rounded album; you can tell this hasn’t been a hurried affair and Arborise’s charm and fragility is really alluring. Give it a listen or catch him pretty much everywhere right through to early October. Whether he makes it to the dizzying singer songwriter heights remains to be seen. He’s in good hands too with label Just Music. You can download the album on their site www.justmusic .co.uk. The gap is definitely there for him, as long as he doesn’t take too long getting round to filling it.
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