Think Like A Key 2025
Riding on creative contradictions, Croydon crooner takes his audience on a temporally crooked trip.
Oh Contraire!
Mapping his psyche on aural landscapes has been this English musician’s modus operandi for a dozen years now, an effort reflected in a dozen full-length platters and a few lesser records, yet each time Nick Frater’s songs are corralled into a new album there’s a feeling of a fresh endeavor, and the eleven numbers of “Oh Contraire!” invite his listeners to visit the make-believe domain with a clean slate of mind. Traditionally rather short, even when accessed together, the pieces on display offer a riveting variety of moods, all fitted with an appropriate arrangement, but what can be at first glance seen as a power-pop pastiche should turn out to represent an alternative retrofuturistic reality in which the Sixties never ceased to exist. Not that such an approach resulted in any stylistic challenge, although it gave the artist and his friends a lot of space for flights of fantasy – simultaneously flawed and compelling.
Cinematic from the very start, where instrumental opener “Fanfare” drenches the sound-spectators in orchestral grandeur and shoots horns and strings through with whooshing shards of cosmic synthesizers before Frater’s finely fleshed-out vocals focus sharp rock ‘n’ roll licks of the almost relentless “My Heart’s In Stereo” on his emotions, this tuneful cycle is as sweet as it is deceptively simple. Nick’s tracks are sophisticated, infectious riffs and refrains of “One Minute” and “I Know You Know I Know” showing his firm grip on lyrically driven melodies, yet while the effervescent “Song For The One Eyed City” comes across as a consciously histrionic attempt to channel the past into the present, the equally scintillating, if seductively slower, “Final Reminder” goes on a further time warp, allowing the Brit to streamline his multi-instrumental, exquisitely detailed sonic intimacy. So “Seraphim Called” may shift gears to harness the Seventies’ sort of light balladry, and “Steal Away” – whence the record’s title emerged – may marry resonant twang to heavenly voices, but the lingering beauty of nigh-celestial “All Roads Lead To Home” will get undermined the repetitive guitar passages propelling “Dreaming Of A Wonderland” forward – a bit unfair, artificial extending of the otherwise perfect half-hour album.
Still, once “Goodnight, Goodbye” signs it off with a lullaby, the order of the universe is restored, because harmonies like these can do no harm to anyone wearing their soul on their sleeve. Au contraire: there’s healing vibe running through the grooves here.
****1/2
