With his debut album ‘All These Nights In Bars Will Somehow Save My Soul’, Lincolnshire-born punk rock troubadour Rob Lynch has taken a leap of faith and scored a perfect ten. Marrying the often disparate disciplines of infectious musicality and genuinely meaningful lyrics with absolute finesse, this acoustic-led record sees Lynch slap his heart down on the table and get his audience singing their lungs out in one fell swoop.
Each song can and does
speak to you on some level; if you’ve ever drunk too much and not
given a damn, lost something you love or even just been lost
yourself, this record tells you in the best possible way that you’re
not alone, and that everything will be okay. I say the best possible
way because the songs are exceptionally, unusually, true to the
subject matter; album highlight ‘My Friends and I’, with its
refrain ‘My friends and I, we’ve got a lot to live fo-o-o-or, my
friends and I, we live the good life, at least just for tonight’
tears along with joy in its heart, exactly as a song like that should
do. It’s so genuine, so heart-on-sleeve, that it’s impossible not
to get caught up in it.
But this is only half
the story, because this record is also deeply, intensely personal. On
the slow-burning ‘Whiskey’, Lynch recalls visiting his father,
who died when he was 21, in hospital, where he heard him telling
patients around him about a night when the two of them drunk too much
whiskey and played each other their favourite songs; in doing so, he
creates a perfect song which drips emotion at the same time as
delivering an irresistible melodies – this is essential listening.
This incredibly
successful formula is revisited on ‘Stamford’, a song which will
appeal to those with the King Blues’ debut album still on repeat,
and which looks back with a heavy heart while vowing that ‘I’ve
still got a lot of love’. Similarly, ‘Feeling Good’ carries an
infectious hopefulness stretched across the melancholy upon which the
record is built. This melancholy is extremely close to the surface on
the stripped-back ‘Some Nights’, bleeding through Lynch’s
sincere vocals to producing a haunting antithesis to the more
energetic cuts on the album, and is present too on ‘Blame’, an
honest self-examination couched within a simple chord progression.
Meanwhile the gentle ‘True Romance’ is an end-of-the-night
reflection on love, and ‘Medicine’ bounces along regardless of
its grave subject matter.
Elsewhere things get
more energetic, with ‘Hand Grenade’ living up to its name and
closing track ‘Widow’ building to a rousing crescendo to round
off the album in perfect style, with against-all-odds positivity
dancing in the face of adversity. ‘Broken Bones’, which follows
on from acoustic album opener ‘31/32’, is boisterous in all the
right ways, and boasts one of the finest choruses on the album, a
serious achievement when considered alongside the competition.
There is no doubt that
that ‘All These Nights In Bars…’ is one of the best records of
the year – that’s just a fact. Coming from the stable of Xtra
Mile Recordings, one of the most aptly-named labels in the world, it
was always going to be good, but even by their high standards this is
excellent, Lynch’s every word, chord and breath is heartbreaking
yet utterly compelling and completely inclusive at the same time, all
underpinned by an inimitable punk-rock authenticity, an ear for a
catchy vocal melody and a determination to focus always on
positivity. Over the 39 and a half minutes it takes to listen to the
record from start to finish, you’ll feel like you’ve spent a
night drinking in a bar with Rob Lynch, and he might just have
somehow saved your soul as well as his own.
Words - Joe Ponting
Out now via Xtra Mile Recordings