All you need may be love, but love isn't all you need. Look at Fyfe Dangerfield. As lead singer for Guillemots, his swooping vocals helped lead the London four-piece to a Mercury Prize nomination for 2006's Through the Windowpane, a debut album overflowing with ideas and passion. Romantic grandeur and wide-eyed sincerity were part of Guillemots' early appeal, but that group's stylistic adventurousness and avant-garde impulses are all but gone on Dangerfield's solo debut, Fly Yellow Moon.
Instead we get syrupy sentimentality and drab earnestness. Fly Yellow Moon sticks to the modest, direct simplicity of classic 1970s singer-songwriter albums. Backed by piano, acoustic guitar, and in places orchestration that dimly recalls Guillemots' lushness, Dangerfield's voice still leaps tall buildings, while his words trade in schmaltzy clichés and his tunes too often fail to assert their own personality.
The problem definitely isn't a lack of feeling. The opening whoop of "When You Walk in the Room" sets the carefree, love-filled spirit nicely enough, and it's easy to believe Dangerfield when he sings, "I can't help it if I'm happy." Some of his former band's knack for atmosphere comes through occasionally, too. On the waltzing, acoustic "High on the Tide", children's chatter and seagull's squawks give a beach setting to Dangerfield's delicately voiced professions of happiness.
Fly Yellow Moon just can't quite solve that old problem: how to be mushy but not mundane. Dangerfield wants "to be near you all day" on the "Hallelujah"-ish "Barricades", to "put my hands around your heart" on the "No Woman No Cry"-ish "Livewire", and to "run circles around you" on the "Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon"-ish "So Brand New". "Firebird" finds him wanting to re-enact music hall staple "Daisy Bell". I'm sure it's all very well-meaning, but it's also saccharine and, in places, a little embarrassing. Before his next outing, let's hope Dangerfield remembers that even Stevie Wonder, that maestro of happy love songs, eventually did "I Just Called to Say I Love You".
