Songdog - A Wretched Sinner's Song (2008)

Tracklist

01. Ruben's Tattoo
02. Crown Of Thorns
03. Owls
04. The Devil Needs You For His Squeeze
05. Like Kim Novak
06. A Prayer To Old Idols
07. I Bought A Rose From The Guy At The Traffic Lights
08. The Likes Of You And Me
09. Interlude
10. Pilgrim Hill
11. A Wretched Sinner's Song
12. She Lets Me In By The Back Door
13. Loser Heaven
14. Just Another Night In Limbo
15. Barbarella
16. Montparnasse
17. On Porthcawl Sands
18. The Time For Miracles Is Past
19. She Said I Kind Of Looked Like Strindberg

A Wretched Sinner’s Song is the band’s fourth album release and the follow-up to their critically acclaimed album The Time Of Summer Lightning, released in 2005. If all three previous albums were award-winning playwright and Songdog frontman Lyndon Morgans’s attempt to escape his Welsh heritage, the former black sheep from introspective mining town Blackwood has gone full circle, with A Wretched Sinner’s Song an altogether more reflective and confessional piece of work.

With fans varying from John Kennedy on XFM to Jonathan Ross on Radio 2, and with Bruce Springsteen previously using Songdog music to announce his arrival on stage, the band have developed a loyal following in the UK and beyond.

With A Wretched Sinner’s Song, the listener is taken through a deeper, darker musical experience. Heavily sensual, ferally romantic, the album conjures the densely populated world of drifters, drunks, psychotics, sad loners and wistful dreamers. The making of the album involved a very personal journey for Lyndon, who, whilst researching where he was from as background to the music he was writing, found out that he was adopted. His long-lost sister was one of the pouting, bass-playing models in Robert Palmer’s iconic video for ‘Addicted To Love’.

Lyndon formed Songdog in 2000 with childhood best friend and musical foil, Karl Woodward, and Scottish multi-instrumentalist Dave Paterson, though all had arrived independently arrived in London to start their musical journey towards the end of the 70s, just as punk grabbed the collective consciousness by the throat. That punk mentality remains a part of Songdog’s sense of self, even when making an acoustic-based album such as this.

Another part is constituted by the uncompromising, explicit lyricism, challenging the rose-tinted world of mainstream pop. Lyndon is someone who likes to break with convention. Finding himself between bands in the early 90s he made his first serious attempt at writing a play, Water Music, which told the story of a group of fairground prostitutes in the 60s. Despite one of the judges binning the play instantly, feeling it strayed across the border from art into porn, one of the backroom girls at the theatre rescued it, read it, loved it and demanded a re-reading by the panel.

It was eventually awarded the Verity Bargate Award for Best New Play. A monologue he wrote, Conte de Fées, written entirely in French, also managed to upset the judges of the Radio France Internationale Awards for Best New Short Stories when they discovered, after handing Lyndon the Award, that he was Welsh and not remotely French.

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