Pocketbooks, Flight Paths

review by dave heaton

I’m not sure I can write with honesty about the London band Pocketbooks’ first album without mentioning Belle & Sebastian. The influence is apparent within seconds of the album’s start, and never really goes away. To be fair, they dabble in other styles (the old-fashioned dance-hall stroll of “Skating on Thin Ice”), and they clearly love other bands of the same ilk, like probably those that inspired Belle & Sebastian (influences are always more mazes than straight lines). But it’s remarkably, at times almost astonishingly, clear where they’re coming from. If someone told me this was meant as an album-length homage to Belle & Sebastian circa If You’re Feeling Sinister, I’d say that makes perfect sense.

That said, if that style of music is your thing, and it is mine, you’re likely to find Flight Paths a complete pleasure from start to finish, as I do. These are lovingly melodic, smart and sensitive pop songs that roll forward like a spring breeze, carrying the same sense of freshness and melancholy, capturing the fleetingness of the moment. Actually, “Fleeting Moments” is the name of one song, come to think of it. The album is titled Flight Paths, and the songs together do seem focused on the movement of people away and towards each other, on planes, trains or lonely streets. Sometimes they do walk together, like on the sweet love song at the album’s start (“Footsteps”), but usually not quite as in sync.

What is in sync are the vocalists – Andy Hudson and Emma Hall – who sing nicely, often cleverly back and forth, and all five musicians, who tightly push the tunes forward. As the album proceeds, the less you care about who they do or don’t sound like; the more you get fully invested in the songs themselves, which sound great and have a personal slant that I imagine anyone could identify with. The more you listen, the more you care about the characters in the songs – the couple quietly falling apart in “Sweetness and Light”, the girl living in the fading “Outskirts of Town” – and the more you recognize them.

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