Fishing 4 Compliments - Lost in Good Intentions (2025)

Five years on, the Huddersfield quintet fronted by songwriter Eileen Wattam return with their second album, Lost In Good Intentions, one that sees them expanding on the debut’s folk-pop sound to embrace blues and 80s rock dynamics.

Opening with a chugging bass riff and calls of yeah yeah before breaking into the sort of chiming guitar music you might expect from The Bangles, ‘Hard To Please’ waves a red flag about a cockily self-assured Romeo who’ll chew you up and diss you behind your back. By way of an immediate change, riding a pulsing repetitive keyboards riff ‘Empty Eyes’ pitches itself musically somewhere amid Fleetwood Mac and All About Eve as it again details someone (“with your blood stained shoes and your empty eyes”) you really don’t want to be around while, with its circling watery guitar intro, bluesy percussion and nagging psych-folk riff, ‘Ghosts’ is one of those gotta get out of this town and leave the chains behind songs.

The bassline intro suggests some Velvets influences before settling into folksier pop with circling guitar notes, steady drums and Wattam’s melancholic vocals ‘If I Could Have What You Had’ is addressed to some who had it all and threw it all away, leading into the slower. more acoustic ‘Secret Room’ with it piano and gradual swell and darker lyrics about what seems to concern abuse, toxic societies and children living in fear.

The percussion harking to late 60s psych folk (Steve Peregrin Took comes to mind), ‘Making Millions’ is about being exploited for the profit of others, while the more musically upbeat, rhythmically chugging ‘Feeling Lucky’ harks back to the feel of the opener with echoes of Fairground Attraction and Kirsty McColl and jaunty wordless backing vocals where self-assurance doesn’t equate to arrogant rudeness, although it takes a downbeat turn as she sings how “he falls through every hand he tried to hold on to”.

Wreathed in keyboard mists, the longest track at five minutes, ‘Hand To Reach You’ has a stripped back blues gothic-folk vibe with haunted guitar notes and a similar lyrical gloom (“nowhere that you belong, no hand to reach to”) with its there but for fortune and we could do better for others conclusion. That’s picked up in the lively, penultimate, brushed snares countrified jogalong ‘Listen More’ and its resolve to be a better friend, the album closing with the folksy chimes and warbled vocals of ‘How You Amaze Me’, a song that balances the regret-tined memories of what was with the buoyant hope of what it might be again (“when I sleep I’ll dream of meeting you again/just like before you’ll dance around and round the floor/you’ll drive me crazy…and then we’ll laugh about those summer times/and we’ll cry ‘bout the pouring rain…it’s good to know you’ve been here all the while”). As a fishing expedition goes, they definitely have the hooks to reel you in.