Call him a wimp, call him a feeb, call him a hopeless heart-on-sleever, but from the Field Mice through Trembling Blue Stars, few have wrung quite as much beauty from heartache and misery as Bob Wratten. To be fair, not every song Wratten has written is about heartache and misery, but they may as well be. He has a way with minor-key melancholy, albeit not much of a way with anything else. His is a one-note world, and a better one for it. Still, romantic misery is a young man's game, and as the somewhat lackluster The Seven Autumn Flowers demonstrated, this far down the line, a little bit of Wratten goes a long way.
To his credit, though, Trembling Blue Stars' sixth album The Last Holy Writer is rarely mushy. Sappy, maybe, but rarely mushy. The production is sharp, the synth flourishes sympathetic, Wratten's points of reference too high-class and hip to hurt him. In fact, all the highpoints of The Last Holy Writer are especially high, as far as music meant to make you feel low goes; Wratten is nothing if not consistent.
But pulling off any disc this relentlessly focused on the morose is a tough job, and even a writer as talented as Wratten has a time slogging it out from start to finish. As hard as it is to complain about music that aims for loveliness above all else, too many songs are so melodically simple, their tempos glacial and their sound icy and cold, that they threaten to drag the rest of the disc down with them.
The drifting "By False Lights", for example, takes forever (well, nearly three of its five minutes) before it hits much of a modest melodic payoff. "Schnee Gletscher Glas" is similarly an exercise in mood setting and not much more. The slow-jam gaits of "Sacred Music" and "The Coldest Sky" are pretty but boilerplate, and sound a lot like one of Robert Smith's recently unearthed home demos. The would-be epic album closer "A Statue to Wilde" is such an earnest slog it's hard to take as seriously as current Wratten foil Beth Arzy sings it.
Fortunately, the rest of the disc is packed with wonderful (if predictable) highpoints, doled out strategically, and when they come around, all is forgiven. "November Starlings", with its ringing guitar pattern and perfect bridge, is as good as any Field Mice song, while "Idyllwild" uses Arzy to better effect as it shifts from typically twee to (relatively) forceful. "This Once Was an Island" is, along with "November Starlings", one of the few faster forays, its hiccupy neo-electro programming and murky synths the perfect bed for Wratten's environmentally themed ennui. "Say Goodbye to the Sea" lives up to its name as a strummy folk waltz, and "The Tenth of Always" plays like a Motown track at dreamy half-speed, sweet northern soul for the sad and downtrodden; when the tremolo guitar enters the picture your heart practically wobbles with it.
"It's just the way your heart beats," sings Wratten, by way of explanation for what draws him back again and again to the ones who hurt him most. "If you think you've gone too far, just keep going," he adds, in a sense answering to all who have stuck with his downs and downers for the better part of two decades. Like a moth to a flame, the guy can't help it. The vicarious romantic in all of us should be thankful Wratten's been there for the past 20 years, taking one for the team again and again while our record collections and emotional playlists benefit.
