CHIRP: The Chicago Independent Radio Project

Elizabeth Ramborger writes

Record Review: Butcher Boy, Profit in Your Poetry

Some quick facts for the gentle reader:

• Butcher Boy is a 7 piece outfit out of Glasgow, Scotland.

• Lead singer John Blain Hunt hosted successful pop night The National Pop League (immortalized in the Camera Obscura song “Knee Deep at the National Pop League”) in Glasgow up until this past summer.

• According to band mate and lead guitarist Basil Pieroni, Butcher Boy is named for a Booker Prize-winning novel by John McCabe: “It’s beautifully written, dark, disturbing and makes fun of stifling small town mores with the blackest of humour.”

• Their first album, Profit in Your Poetry was released last year in the UK by London-based label (and club night of the same name) How Does it Feel to Be Loved?. Profit will make it stateside via Red Eye Distribution on October 7th.

These details might give you some idea of the pedigree of the band and its bent. Butcher Boy has been compared to some fine bands—Felt, the Tindersticks, Belle & Sebastian, and the Smiths, to name a few. But while the influences are there, Butcher Boy succeeds at making a lovely chamber pop all its own. Its lyrics conjure up an interior landscape of observations and emotions well suited to the current change of seasons.

The strength of Profit in Your Poetry is that influences inform songs rather than serving as quick indie pop shortcuts. Sure there’s jangle, sure there might be a nice tambourine here and there, but these classics aren’t the only tricks Butcher Boy has under its sleeve. Hunt’s voice and lyrics color Butcher Boy’s broad pop sensibilities with an autumnal layer of melancholy. Says Basil, the band’s agenda is “to make beautiful music that means something to the people who hear it.” The mood is set in opening track, “Trouble and Desire,” all pensive viola, cello, and guitar. Things build momentum with the title track, an urgent guitar and nice beat filling out the sound, leading to more jangle on “I Lost Myself” and “Girls Make Me Sick.”

If there’s a criticism here its that some songs suffer from a bit of an identity crisis—I found myself wanting a song to be one thing or another (sad or happy?). The song “Fun” starts out almost needlessly slow. But on the standout tracks—“I Lost Myself” in particular—this formula succeeds. A sadness on the onset reveals a sparkle underneath that fully charms. Butcher Boy lets one peek at a bittersweet interior world of contradictions—breaking hearts “just for fun.”

When Hunt sings he’s “just looking for a home,” I think of Rilke’s autumn missive, that: “whoever has no house by now, will not build…[will] walk along sidewalks under large trees, not going home, as the leaves fall and blow away.” It’s this sense of lyrical imagery that is ultimately the biggest influence on—and biggest takeaway from Profit.

http://www.howdoesitfeel.co.uk/butcherboy.html