Your Cuckoo is the Teenage Waitress follow up to stunning debut album Love & Chemicals, one of my albums of the year in 2020. Three years on and (the young) Daniel Ash has once again pulled out all the stops and created what is highly likely to be my album of the summer, as it is, it has already been an essential soundtrack to the last couple of weeks unseasonably good weather for Glasgow. Maybe this album was a conduit for that…
…if not, it has certainly been a conduit in playing a part in helping maintain my upbeat mood and general positivity, plugging in my headphones and listening to the songs on Your Cuckoo providing the musical background to my working day, not quite making problems disappear but giving me the right attitude to deal with them. I know that may sound cliched and over-dramatic, but music is powerful, I believe music does have the ability to affect your mood, and as a result, your behaviours. If you catch me on a day when, for some reason, music hasn’t been part of my routine, you’d know what I mean.
On Your Cuckoo, Daniel has the ability to swing between wistful melancholy and unbridled joy, often within the space of one song, Grey Day and I Like the Way You Fall in Love two cases in point, the latter really opening up into a full throttle joyful escapade as it reaches its rapturous conclusion. Listening to the songs on this charming collection, the “theme” seems to be that of relationships, not just relationships with others – whether these may be failed relationships, wished for relationships or just loving and celebrating love – but also relationships with yourself, with your life and everything that comes with that, and the relationship you have with your past – the other single from the album, Backseat a perfect illustration of this.
It may just be the way my brain works, but I always manage to find personal associations with songs and lyrics, helping cement my relationship with a band or album. Bedroom Waltz reminding me of days in my former years where my anxiety (before I knew it was “anxiety”) had me staying in on Saturday nights, filing my records in alphabetical order rather than having to, god forbid, socialise with people. Despite the vast age difference between myself and Daniel (in Backseat when he reminisces about his youth I can relate to most of it apart from the texting random girls with nothing to say bit, trying to get the landline and stretch the cord to a place the rest of your family couldn’t hear was a close as I got…) Your Cuckoo is an album full of reference points that make it relevant to me, drawing me in and painting pictures in my mind.
The musical reference points on Your Cuckoo are many, in the first three songs, we go from the stirringly and heartfelt Baby Blue, with its funktastically soulful Stevie Wonder outro, to a frenzied blast of pop punk in Maggie, closely followed by a sweeping epic bombastic masterpiece in Grey Sky, channelling a majestic soaring mix of 1980s synth, The Cure and The Killers. This is one of the (many) outstanding tracks on the album, “underneath the grey sky, I do believe it’s alright”, a couplet that plays right into my emotions, and I shit you not, on my first listen to this album, I was driving, during Grey Sky, the clouds parted to reveal flashes of a stunning clear blue sky, by the end of the song the whole sky had opened up before me.
Why Grey Sky and its follow up Backseat weren’t smash hit singles beggars belief. Backseat is almost as perfect a “pop” single as I’ve heard in years. Building images in your head from the off with car keys and doors slamming, Daniel makes effective use of vocoder and synths and matches them with perfect youthful memories – “wasting” nights in the company of friends, but creating memories all the same. It feels like a pre-cursor to its preceding song on the album Big Smoke, opening with an element of despondency at the routine of life, before opening up into a soaring story of escaping the rat race. I was still driving for work the first time I heard this, by this time the sky was blue and the vista in front of me as I drove through the Perthshire countryside on top of this song meant, despite heading to and not away from work, I had not a care in the world. That’s the power of great music.
As the album reaches its conclusion, Too Much of Good Thing feels like a mix of The Beatles, Bob Dylan and, believe it or not, old school music hall singalongs, while The Beatles reference continues into the emotional ballad Hold Me in the Afternoon which has Lennon/McCartney written all over it, before the album closes in style with Salutations. A fitting album closer, another life affirming reflection on relationships, musically a celebratory bluesy and soulful affair with almost a hint of bittersweet melancholy, the icing on the cake being the gloriously angelic backing vocals.
Mr Ash, I salute you, once again you’ve produced an album that reaches the parts other albums cannot reach, filled with joy and melancholic reflections, and most importantly some memorable tunes to provide a soundtrack to hazy summer days.