The music industry is forever letting rumours of its' supposedly 'best kept secrets' seep into the marketplace, but while it's easy to be blase about these things, there can't be many 'best kept secrets' out there who've released a staggering 14 albums, played concerts to 90,000 fans and won their country's Music Awards Album of The Year trophy without the mass western market getting more than a perfunctory whiff of them.
So welcome to the world of Cape Town-based, Zambian-born ROBIN AULD: an accomplished singer/ songwriter of Scottish descent whose fame in his homeland has propelled him to something akin to folk hero status, but whose muse has stubbornly refused to travel in commercial terms.
Until now, at least, for with his new album "Diamond Of A Day" (his fifteenth, one assumes?), Robin must have an evens-favourite chance of cracking it on a wider scale. Because, put simply, this album proffers nicely-upholstered guitar pop wall to wall, with the emphasis placed firmly on well-crafted songwriting of the Neil Finn variety, with Auld displaying a similarly unnerring knack for radio friendly hooks and killer choruses along the way.
Opener - and arguably this writer's favourite track here - "Beautiful Things" - gives you some idea what to expect. It's classy, dreamy guitar pop which gets to the point, jealously hoards an ability for chromatic melody and proves Robin Auld is a pretty handy guitarist into the bargain.
He hits similar heights with tracks like "Solid Gold" and the excellent "All The Girls Cried". The former is typical of the immediate guitar pop he's made his own, and features convincingly throaty vocals and a wry comment on the fleeting nature of pop success ( sample lyric: "It could be better, but it could be worse/ it'll come together by the second verse") that suggests our hero may have achieved cult favourite status at home, but has clearly suffered his share of slings and arrows too. "All The Girls Cried", meanwhile, is a well-paced Beatlesque paean to River Pheonix and those who die young ("Who did he leave his millions to?/ who got the guitar-shaped swimming pool?") and demonstrates Auld can do 'melancholic' with the best of them.
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The remainder of the album doesn't hit quite such auspicious heights, but that's not to denigrate the rest of his material, which is intrinsically strong throughout. Indeed, 'consistent' is the word springing to mind when considering "Diamond Of A Day", and you can't really fail to connect when you've got immediate, joyous little gems like "I Got Lucky" and "Bobby Come Back" in the bag and can temper the optimism with the gentle sarcasm Auld intoduces via "Long Lost" and the pithy, brass-assisted "Court Of Mary."
Of course, the pop world is notoriously slippery and fickle and these days only a fool bets on an apparent certainty. But for all that, when a record's this sunkissed, generous of melody and well-turned of phrase, it's still hard to imagine too many clouds blocking out this "Diamond Of A Day" around the world.
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