Think Like A Key 2025
Toning down gorgeousness, renown master of sonic raptures unfolds a boundless panorama of returning possibilities.
Box Harry Day
Now mostly known as a producer, Fran Ashcroft started out as a musician, so his comeback to performative status with “A Tour Of British Duck Ponds” back in 2023 shouldn’t have been too surprising – only it was. But while that album presented stylistically varied extravaganza, its follow-up finds the Englishman snap to the other end of dynamic spectrum and shape his arresting tunes into a series of symphonically minimalistic compositions of rare beauty. With the record’s title referring to a Lancashire phrase for a day before pay, one could hardly combine sense of humor with a sense of expectancy emanating from this dozen of cuts more eloquently. Still, a lot of sentiments on offer are rooted not so much in Ashcroft’s songs as in a series of fragmentarily numbered instrumental vignettes called “Pebble” – which is Fran’s metaphor for the use of AI to orchestrate his melodies – interspersing them.
It make take the listener a bit of time to realize that the veteran gathered these stones on the shores of “Swan Lake” – even though the soul-shattering coda of “End Of The Trail” is pure Mozart, rather than Tchaikovsky – yet from the very instant “Prelude” introduces stirring strings and wondrous woodwind, there’s no denying the soft impact of grandeur lying behind the artist’s low-fi intent. However, where such pieces as the deliciously psychedelic, piano-rippled “Good Day” or spiritually countrified, organ-bolstered “Lonely Traveller” – a vocal-double-tracking sequel of sorts to “The Wayfaring Stranger” – provide a riveting aural contrast to the classically influenced tapestries, “Pebble Drop” marries the two dynamic idioms most perfectly, adding an alluring backdrop to Ashcroft’s intimate tones. Fran’s turning conversational – and controversial, but never confrontational – in “Flag Waving British Bastard” which draws in equal measure on West End stage shows and chamber pop, tremulously frivolous in the platter’s Beatlesque titular ballad which puts his talent as a guitarist to the fore, and serenely grounded in the cosmic “Gravitational Pull” which sees him reach for eternity, and the mood shifts create the constant movement rendering “Box Harry Day” a quiet triumph.
Circles on water can seem tremendous, indeed.
****2/3
