Findlay Brown – Love Will Find You

Findlay Brown's first release Separated By The Sea was a folky collection of love songs with leanings towards the psychedelic 60s West Coast. Written for his girlfriend, its personal introspection got some rave reviews if also considered a bit on the safe side. This time around, being laid up with a broken leg gave him time to delve a few years further back into his record collection and find inspiration in (most noticeably) Roy Orbison, a post-army smoochy Elvis, and the Joe Meek stable. With Bernard Butler on board to add his retro stylings (recently honed with Duffy of course) to all but the single 'All That I Have' (credits there go to the Beyond The Wizards Sleeve team), Brown's desire to search for the classic pop song formula is undoubtedly breaking no new ground. If anything he's playing even safer now.When similar issues of faux-familiarity threatened to cloud Duffy's Rockferry, she could always fall back on her awkward innocence and the power of her distinctive voice to make an impact. Brown has a harder struggle for identity on this release, which is surprising for a former bare-knuckle boxer (it says here). Too often he lacks the conviction or soulful gravitas of, say, fellow Yorkshire crooner Richard Hawley. Not having got you on side, his presence then slips away under an undeniably comforting haze of pleasant melodies and tasteful string arrangements. In fact, this atmosphere of contented ambivalence is only punctured by 'I Still Want You' - where Orbison's trademark juddering rhythm only serves to emphasise a particularly anaemic performance. There are some borderline excellent tunes, but lyrically he rarely strays far from wishy-washy platitudes, which only goes to show how hard it is to write an effective simple love song. The pick of the bunch are opener 'Love Will Find You', the breezy 'Holding Back The Night', and the melodramatic 'Everybody Needs Love', which could double for an early Bee Gees cover - though sung some octaves lower of course. Only 'That's Right' reaches out to an actual rock'n'roll tempo.The Bernard Butler connection will see Brown supporting the Grammy winning ("there's lovely") Welsh poppet on tour shortly, and the height of his ambition seems to be a slot on the Radio 2 daytime playlist. That's not to say it's bad as such, being a skilfully executed exercise, just that the album reeks so strongly of this deliberate intent that it becomes distracting. From the very beginning, decades before the X Factor, the likes of Joe Meek and other impresarios meant that pop could be contrived, but at its best it should never sound so. Findlay Brown is currently punching below his weight with Love Will Find You. 58%Findlay Brown on MySpace