Sam Duckworth - The Mannequin

Sam Duckworth was always likeable, if unspectacular, as Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly, lending his support to various worthy causes such as the Love Music, Hate Racism campaign. As such, you could frequently find yourself wanting to like the songs more than you actually did. While often perfectly fine and sometimes very good, they rarely threw up anything that made you desperate to revisit them. While a lot of his charm lay in the fact that he seemed like the geeky kid next door who’d turned up at the party with his guitar, this common touch and everyman appeal can only last so long before people start craving something extraordinary.

In the promotional material Duckworth has talked about trying to ‘capture the late night lucid space of travelling thoughts’ and there’s certainly a nocturnal feel to ‘The Mannequin’, at times the songs seem wrapped in a sleepy haze as Duckworth picks out looping motifs over a warm, synthy backing. Listening to the opening track, from which the album takes it’s name, though, you’d be hard pressed to guess at what was to follow. The heart initially sinks to hear Duckworth sounding like a slightly less shit Jack Johnson. Thankfully though, it’s not a sound he sticks with, in fact, it seems as though that was the last song recorded in the daylight before the curtains were drawn and the night came down. When considered like that it fits well at the start of the album even if it does create a somewhat false impression.

Shedding the pseudonym and adopting his own, given name for this album invites questions about whether this a more personal work, whether the mask has now dropped to reveal the true Sam Duckworth, free from artifice and pretence. Such questioning though, is redundant, artists have always adopted personas to free themselves from the shackles of the self (or something less wanky). Rather, what this album seems to represent is an older, calmer Sam Duckworth, a Sam Duckworth settling into adulthood reflecting on people and times since left behind and the uncertainty in the world around him. It’s a far from flawless album though, there are times the sleepy, night-time feel veers perilously close to being just plain dull, and ultimately it fails to really pull you in or offer anything vaguely extraordinary.