How old - or how successful - do you have to be to lose the art of subversion? At which point do you stop re-inventing MOR and start delivering the cliches without the twists? That's the question posed by 'The Gunman And Other Stories', a collection of mushy and over-produced songs loosely on the theme of cowboys.
Back in the '80s, Paddy McAloon's Prefab Sprout were a wry, intellectual delight; mingling bookishness with new man emotionalism, setting lyrical word-games to twisted but pretty pop music. Somewhere in the last, arid decade, however, McAloon's slow-moving career took a horrifying turn: he began writing cod-country songs for, God help him, Jimmy Nail.
One of those tunes, the opening 'Cowboy Dreams', appears to be the impetus behind 'The Gunman…. To his credit, McAloon makes an even less credible western hero than Nail did, though you suspect realism wasn't part of his plan. Instead, it's a soft-focus, old Hollywood vision of life on the range he's purveying. And a largely unattractive one, too.
Sometime Bowie producer Tony Visconti brings an array of bad synth effects, session guitar breaks and a rotten saxophone solo to make already sagging songs unbearably glutinous; the version of the traditional 'Streets Of Laredo' is especially hellish, too airbrushed even for the current '80s revival.
More alarmingly, McAloon's wit and brightness now seems limited to tortuous extended metaphors on gambling ('Wild Card In The Pack') and fire ('Cornfield Ablaze'), overwhelmed by an apparently sincere love of cliché. The saturated melodies are still there, but it's hard to find them amidst all the guff. Masochists, however, may take pleasure in McAloon's parched and joyless "Yippee-Aye-Yay" on 'Cowboy Dreams' or his excruciatingly hokey "Meeows" on 'Farmyard Cat'. Frontier life, you suspect, wouldn't really suit him - especially if the locals heard this travesty. Whipcrack away!
