The debut album, The Magic Land of Radio by London band Obi grew up to be just nine tracks in length and came to little over 30 minutes in duration. Nothing wrong with that. Even The Strokes albums are no more generous. The difference is their similarly minimal approach to arrangements. Coming somewhere between The Lilac Time, Goldrush, Garlic and Pavement, vocalist Damian Katkhuda and chums trade in the kind of heart-warming, googly, blissed-out eccentricity of a thousand and one episodes of ‘Northern Exposure’, and yet you can’t help feeling that these little buds of quirky joy fail to actually bloom. But for it’s failure to build, ‘To Some Folk’ could be the kind of Christmas radio surprise that Bady Drawn Boy’s ‘Donna & Blitzen’ was a few Christmases ago. But play by the rules they don’t and though it’s evidently crying out for it, there’s not one sleigh-bell, one mince pie or one heart rending string-section to be heard. It’s subtle, of course, it’s tasteful, but competing against a streetful of oversized exploding santas and ball-sized fairy lights ‘To Some Folk’ looks set to be left to one side along with that Remmington Nose Trimmer, that sockful of shelled-nuts and that Manchester United Filofax your granny got you.
It’s not a xmas single – but it does have a good solid wintry feelgood factor 10. In fact sitting in front of your TV on Christmas Even and watching back to back DVDs of ‘About A Boy’, ‘Bridget Jones’, ‘Four Weddings and A Funeral’ and ‘Love Actually’ could fail to equal the good natured English eccentricity of Obi.
It’s good – is that a bad thing?