Thomas Bush - The Next 60 Years

 

Speaking from this side of the Channel, one of the most remarkable tricks played on us by refined British musicians has always been the ease with which they intertwined pure elegance with a dreadful sense of decay, the disturbing and the mundane, scrawny sounds and lyrical melodies. Think of early Psychic TV albums, Cordelia Records’ Leven Signs or Mr Concept and now, Thomas Bush.

 

The Next 60 Years exudes this tongue-in-check British dolefulness combined with a slick sense of dramaturgy, the whole A-side building up towards Robert Wyatt-esque bare and slow pop songs Burn Clear and Face in the Water. Thomas Bush’s low, barely singing voice, drowned in ennui summons ghostly figures: Mark Fisher, Martin Amis, late J.G. Ballard or the Rings of Saturn’s WG Sebald, and all those who unveiled Britain’s bad conscience.