Pugwash and XTC collaborator Duncan Maitland brings a sixties sunshine pop brilliance to his debut album. Awash with a songwriter’s dedication to craft, sighing melodies and a voice that recalls Jason Falkner at his most dreamily bucolic, Lullabies mines a fabled seam of power pop and Beatlesque balladry wonderfully.
Dunc is joined by an all-star line up including Ger Eaton of Las Vegas Basement and Tosh Flood of Saville and Pugwash, all blokes who know their way around the blissful pop Maypole.
Handbirds, with its leisurely plucked banjo and phased guitar, is good enough to have featured on XTC’s album Apple Venus and Insect Under The Stone marries late Beatles’ whimsy with a dip into Wind in The Willows. There are points where you wish Maitland would snap out of his trance and kick out the jams but truly he is the new Duke of Stratosphere.
Alan Corr
