A God-awful Small Affair

Jon Fratelli would've been quite a long way down my list of potential multi-platform musicians from the 2000s lasting into the 2010s. But the former Fratelli has so far enjoyed a bit of success with the quite-alright-but-forgettable Codeine Velvet Club and has now decided to ditch them all and go entirely solo. It's no great secret that for pretty much the entirety of his career he'll have been fighting off Pitchforkers and their anger over the rise of pub-rock (and even for the most enduring listener, Chelsea Dagger got a little bit annoying) but perhaps the opportunity is now there for Fratelli, real name John Lawler, to make a creative stamp on the music world. Certainly his second band showed potential but seemed more pastiche than pastime, and never really inspired me. The outlook just peering over the tracklisting is bleak. The false, doe-eyed nature of some of Fratelli's songwriting is transparent enough to give itself away with titles like 'Oh Shangri...