Britain's indie scene has rarely felt more more low-stakes than it does right now. The UK albums chart is full of iconoclastic British acts—Radiohead at #1, Skepta, James Blake, Anohni—with very few of them plying their trade on guitar. Even trad-lad bands like the 1975, Catfish and the Bottlemen, and Blossoms have seen the smart money and embraced their boyband potential rather than doggedly committing to life in the indie trenches. Twenty years since Britpop's rot set in, and 10 years on from Arctic Monkeys' debut album, the path to indie success is codified, but a source of ever-diminishing returns; there's the sense of a generation with just enough education to perform, but not really to innovate the genre out of irrelevance.
Oscar Scheller's debut album, Cut and Paste, isn't going to do that either, though a decade ago it might have propelled him to the heights of, say, Jack Peñate, another British cheeky chappy with strong pop instincts. The young Londoner makes blown-out indie jams with magnetic melodies and an obvious British lineage: “Sometimes” echoes the melody of Blur's “Coffee and TV,” and his leaping baritone bears a strong resemblance to both Damon Albarn and Morrissey. (For the latter, see also, “But then I see your face and I want to die,” from “Fifteen,” which moves at the pace of a carnation's twirl.) He samples, or rather, for budgetary reasons, emulates samples of old school hip-hop and chintzy dub—“Good Things,” laced with his plaintive croon, sounds a lot like Saint Etienne's cover of “Only Love Can Break Your Heart.” The combination aligns him with a non-British Anglophile: Scheller's romantic, hotch-potch confections recall Jens Lekman's early records, and share a similarly endearing innocence.
His lyrics are also naïve, but lack Lekman's charm and wit. They're mostly underdeveloped portraits of youthful anxieties: over masculinity (not knowing which football team to support), the passing of time, and whether the promised future will come to pass. “Nothing's as it seems/There's a land where hopes don't meet with dreams,” he croons on the twinkling, dreamy “Gone Forever,” the record's sharpest song. “I feel scared of all the things to come.” As for his own future, Scheller has written for Lily Allen and short-lived Sugababes revival MKS. Cut and Paste is hooky and appealing; with a gear change, he could easily move into a realm where people are actually paying attention. For now, he's a very sweet stream in a cultural backwater.
