In those psychedelic waking moments, just before the sun comes up, one’s mind can go to strange old places; nonsensical connections between dream-world and reality manifests trippy morning hallucinations: the greying dressing-gown hanging on the back of the bedroom door morphs into the exact form of your scary primary school teacher, birdsong becomes the sinister soundtrack to that bad date you had last Friday.
This trippy ‘morning twilight’ was Matt Berry’s starting point for his latest record – an odd and occasionally charming collection. There’s lots that’s good here: the instrumentals, for example, lilting prog rock with a gentle folksy quality that compliments Berry’s smooth vocals. But the lyrics are bizarre to the point that I wonder, at times, whether Berry was deliberately taking the piss. The track ‘The Peach & The Melon’ is possibly the worst offender, with lines including, ‘‘Mrs Wagner’s pies were full of locals/bifocals’ and ‘The fox came in and woke me up/Damn creature/Ate my pizza’, leaving me genuinely baffled, though, admittedly, amused.
