A Year in Music: Martin Donnelly (The Savings and Loan)

Article for www.no more workhorse.com

https://nomoreworkhorse.com/2016/12/27/a-year-in-music-martin-donnelly-the-savings-and-loan-2/

A Year In Music – Martin Donnelly (The Savings and Loan)

Article for www.nomoreworkhorse.com

http://nomoreworkhorse.com/2016/01/01/a-year-in-music-martin-donnelly-the-savings-and-loan/

Album Review: The Savings and Loan - Today I Need Light

There's a long line of miserabilist bands, too numerous to mention here, which generally featured a brooding, baritone singer.  Current exponents of this would be Tindersticks, The National and you can add Scotland's The Savings and Loan to this list.  Consisting of singer Martin Donnelly and Andrew Bush who appears to do the fancy stuff, their debut full length, Today I Need Light opens with the slow, deliberate guitar strum of Swallows.  Vaguely reminiscent of Nick Cave, with a dash of Fearghal McKee thrown in, it sets a mood which is unyielding throughout the nine tracks found here, The Virgin's Lullaby and Catholic Boys In The Rain are an even more Cave-sounding tracks.

 

Some steel guitar gives a country feel to a couple of the tracks here like the weary Lit Out where Donnelly is "tired of London and tired of life", while Her Window and the prettily snail-paced Met (a Storm) features a nice bit of brass, not a million miles away from Tindersticks.  On the opposite end of the scale there's a black as coal version of Star of the County Down, which has a curious charm to it.

 

The album finishes with perhaps its finest song A Pleasing Companion which I can only describe as like an unholy marriage of Richmond Fontaine and Lou Reed in his Berlin period.  The album doesn't reinvent the wheel but it doesn't pretend to either.  Simply, a bunch of melancholic tunes that sit well with fans of moody rock.

EP Review: The Savings and Loan EP

The Savings and Loan is a curiously-named band from Scotland who released this self-titled EP in 2007.  Singer Martin Donnelly is a vocalist from the Nick Cave/Fearghal McKee/Matt Berninger school of singing so this is perfectly pitched for a good old mope.

The EP is bookended by These Hands and Those Hands, effectively the same song in two short versions, the latter being slightly more exuberant.  Introducing the album is Andrew Bush’s (or possibly Donnelly's) plaintive acoustic guitar playing, while Donnelly croons “good evening friends and welcome in, to broken skin on broken skin”.

Swallows has well-worn guitar picking which to any student of Morrissey etc will sound instantly like you can’t believe you haven’t heard it before.  The Virgin’s Lullaby is slightly more Cave-like, all brushed percussion and distorted vocals.  Catholic Boys In The Rain is in a similar vein, introduced by a recording of Scottish poet Tom Leonard reading a list of alcoholic drinks, appropriate as this track will remind some listeners of Irish band Whipping Boy.

After the sweet-sounding Her Window and the glacially-paced Met (A Storm) the EP ends with the crescendo (relative to the rest) of Those Hands, with drums and even electric guitar.  Much of this material ended up on their debut album proper, Today I Need Light, released in 2010 but this is a very promising EP.  It’s not hugely original and Donnelly and Bush sound like a pair of undertakers but they get this sort of thing SO right.  It’s available for free download from http://thesavingsandloan.bandcamp.com/album/the-savings-and-loan-ep