The reason for the brackets is that while this album was released on 15th July, there was another that was released in March, which was acoustic and featured some of the songs, although I presume with different arrangements (I haven’t heard it so can’t comment). Tyla of course needs no introduction as he is/was the frontman of Dogs D’Amour, a band that used to regularly feature in the music press and who have an incredibly strong following. Me, I have always found their music just a little too sleazy and would much rather listen to The Faces or The Quireboys who both did it so much better in my opinion. However, this was the first time I had come across a solo album from Tyla so what was it going to be like?
“Love Is” opens the album and I was soon changing every thought I had ever had about the guy, as this song is an absolute killer with emotional vocals (in a not too dissimilar vein to Tom Waits) and some wonderful music where the band seems to be just on the edge of falling apart but somehow keep it all together. It certainly made me sit up and pay close attention to what was to come next. Could the rest of the album be as good as this? Sadly no. In many ways I found this an incredibly infuriating album to listen to as while there are some truly excellent songs, there are also as many that are the total opposite. “Judas Christ” is only three minutes long, but Tyla seems to have run out of lyrical ideas half way through and the song just doesn’t sound finished. The same is true of “Yeah (I Love You Baby)” which is a fast blues gone bad.
But, the frustrating thing for me is that I get the impression that this could have been a very good album indeed if there had just been a stronger control on song choice. I have seen some incredible reviews for this already on the web, but this isn’t one of them.
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