Over The Hill
WORDS: Sam Easterbrook (Sub Editor)
Firstly take a young woman who sings in a slightly breathy manner.?
Thickly spread onto base of folky pop that sits somewhere between Radio Two, and Six Music.?
Sprinkle on some whimsy and wrap in inky hand-drawn artwork with a typewriter font, and ta-dah! Your very own cut-price Laura Marling.?
Record labels have always done this sort of thing but it seems increasingly prevalent.?
The Internet, rather than opening up consumers ears to all sorts of different forms of music from around the world, has conversely allowed listeners to converge into neat niche pockets of taste.?
Alessi's Ark will find it place alongside Marling on Spotify, LastFM and the Genius function on iTunes but it lacks an edge to escape and spread across these Internet taste pockets.
Yet that lack of edge could see it playlisted at Radio Two and flourish.?
Despite it's apparent sincerity and authenticity there seems a clinical, mathematical safeness to Over The Hill; a construction for ubiquity that with hard-plugging could well establish Alessi's Ark.
Over The Hill is out Monday on Virgin Records and is taken from the debut album Notes From The Treehouse which is out now.
