Sweet Baboo - The Boombox Ballads

A romp of merry, pomp-filled trumpet puffs, and string-jaunts about walking in the pouring rain, Sweet Baboo’s ‘The Boombox Ballads’ is deliberately twee. Less than one minute into proceedings, album opener ‘Sometimes’ springs jauntily upwards into a cheery flourish of strings. Pressing play on this record is like swaggering - thumbs tucked firmly round braces - straight into the supercalifragilisticexpialidocious section of Disney’s Mary Poppins film.

Crashing the romantic balladry of 1950s American Tin Pan Alley headlong into rural North Wales makes for a bizarre old concoction on its own. That’s without adding the fact that Stephen Black cites Harry Nilsson - who famously covered the king of all Power Ballads ‘Without You’ - as a “tentative” influence on the record. On Sweet Baboo’s previous release, ‘Ships,’ Black wrote with the same beaming positivity, but his pairings were unwieldy, his imagery was strange and unfamiliar. The lyric “my heart is fit to bursting, in confetti and silly string,” - from ‘Ships’’ ‘Twelve Carrots of Love’ - is self-aware, flamboyant, and overblown, like an ecstatic Frank O’Hara singing with a brass band and a malfunctioning gameboy.

For all its merriment, though, ‘The Boombox Ballads’ is missing that same sense of oddity. For the most part, this is a record about chasing a specific kind of pop aesthetic instead, which largely comes at the detriment of any kind of real connection. In moments like the brush-snare melodies of ‘I Just Want To Be Good,’ and the decadent, overblown string arrangements of ‘Over & Out,’ Sweet Baboo hits on something surprisingly touching.

For the most part, though, ‘The Boombox Ballads’ is downright strange - just not in the right ways.