Both are London-born, acoustically driven solo artists. Both
released debut albums in the autumn of 2011, and now both have released new EPs
on the same label. They are even the same age. Yet somehow, in the last year,
Ben Howard has amassed five times more listeners on Last.fm, and a Mercury
nomination for best album. Marcus Foster doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page,
and has just finished a tour of America as a support act for, you guessed it,
Mr. Howard. How have two musically homogenous individuals diverged so palpably
in just one year? A swift EP comparison of Howard’s Burgh Island with Foster’s The
Last House makes everything clear.
It’s
worth knowing that Foster grew up with Robert Pattinson, and at some point,
decided to be friends with him. It is perhaps this tendency to make poor life
choices that fed Foster’s decision to incorporate an overwhelming abundance of
strings on this EP. The lead single, for
example, ‘Worn Down By Time’, is a showcase for the man’s impressive
song-writing and melody-making, but it’s thickly coated in an empty,
unnecessarily grandiose gloss of horns and strings. The closer, ‘Solid Ground’,
is a Billy Joel-esque number, marred by superfluous instrumentation. Foster’s
gentle guitar and rasping, 30-Marlboro-Lights-a-day vocals would have made for
a far more enchanting four minutes. This bewildering fetish for all things
stringy and blowy continues throughout; only in ‘Strange Woods’ do the many
musical layers combine cohesively. Sounding somewhat like ‘Shadows of the City’
from the debut LP, with a dramatic
chorus, head-swaying drum beat and blues-rooted structure alongside an exciting
vocal performance, this is proof that Foster could go far if he honed his
craft.
That said, R-Patz’s BFFE pales
into comparison the moment ‘Esmerelda’ kicks off Howard’s new offering. With a
clunky guitar riff somehow sitting well with more delicate plucking, subtle
echoes and even the tiniest hint of futuristic electronic sound bites, a
haunting soundscape is achieved. ‘Oats In The Water’ proves Howard to be as
effective and inventive on electric guitar as the acoustic he preferred on Every Kingdom. This more harrowing,
darker sound sets a wintry tone to the EP, in the vein of ‘Black Flies’. ‘To Be
Alone’ exhibits Howard’s knack for capturing a moment in time, the heavier
drums transporting you to a setting much like that depicted on the cover art.
The huskily muttered “I don’t need nobody to be alone” completes this sense of
isolation, double negatives aside, along with a seaside backdrop of birds, wind
and waves. Finally, the eight-minute title track featuring Monica Heldal feels
like an audible Instagram shot of Brighton Pier on the last day of the summer
holidays. In a good way.
It is
the subtlety and the cohesion with which the layers of the Burgh Island EP interact that set Ben Howard apart from his support
act. There’s an emotional substance and authenticity that Marcus Foster
struggles to produce, though not for want of trying. In the end though, both
have bright futures. And Marcus, if you’re reading this, don’t be disheartened:
I bet Ben doesn’t have a mate like that pasty-faced neck-muncher from those
vampire films, does he?
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