"I intend to live and die a poet", asserts Robert James Selby and, to prove he's as good as his word, his debut album ,released on his own label, contains twelve original songs written on the road and "honed in the bars of European cities".
He was born in Yorkshire, is now based in London and sings in a plaintive, lovelorn voice pitched somewhere between that of Edwyn Collins and Bob Dylan.
The 'scrap-book' quality of his ballads is rendered musically through a deliberately ramshackle sound held together by elegant fiddle playing by Monica Koscielna.
Dressed in the style of a wandering 'wherever I lay my hat' troubadour, he certainly looks the part of a poet who knows it.
And who can deny he is in earnest when he sings in celebration of "opiates and vino" (Aeolian Harp), waxes so lyrically about the doomed genius of Thomas Chatterton and pictures himself "in despair, like a verse of Baudelaire".
Not only that, but many songs are carefully set in well established 'poetic' locations like Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, Soho in London and Grasmere the English Lake District
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Despite, or perhaps because of, all this, the songs strike a false note with me.
On Only Our Love, for example, he imagines being free of possessions and declares pretentiously : "Like children we are born in the lightning of our storms". while on Song For Soho he paints a hobo portrait of this part of London ("bed down, go to a show or just fall in love") which, belongs to the realm of pure fantasy.
With regard to the whole package, there's something about the constant romanticizing of decadence and desolation that seems too mannered to ring true.
His words linger on the fleeting nature of life and love without saying original or profound about either.
Robert James Selby website
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