The Doublecross is the name my friend Jon has been recording under for many years now. I got to know him when I was living in Cardiff as he was in a band with my housemate. He knew pretty much everyone in the local scene, so nearly every acquaintance I had in South Wales was a friend of Jon's too. As I was leaving the country for London, he was finishing off is debut solo album - I vaguely remember him playing us a mix of some of the songs on the car down to Porthcawl for the Across the Borders festival where I was introduced to Magnolia Electric Co.
It was a great album, but there was no avoiding the fact that it had one truly great song (October Skies) which made everything else seem less good by comparison. It's a tough situation when there's one song that so clearly stands out from the rest as being the "great song" - there are many records in my collection where that is the case. Incidentally, my other housemate Nicky struggled with the same issue, because he'd written one song for his band Gunrack? that was so much better than anything else it was constantly the yardstick against which every other song was measured. Whenever I hear an album with that issue I think of Gunrack?'s Young Hearts. Anyway, I travelled back to Cardiff for a night just to see Jon's album release show with Caves that December. It was a nice night.
I've kept up with Jon's solo music since then, but for reasons I can entirely sympathise with (small children) his release cycle is slow, so this only his third solo LP. I've bought music in many strange places over the years, but from the musician's car, parked outside a Chinese restaurant in Oxford in the middle of the afternoon is one of the stranger ones - Jon was passing through Oxford on a tour and timing meant he couldn't stay for long, so when he got into town I popped out from work, met him for about five minutes, had a nice chat (partly about how great El-P's I'll Sleep When You're Dead is, as it was one of the cds he had on his passenger seat for the journey), bought the LP and let him get on his way.
In our short chat he described his second album (which I'm yet to write about on here) as being a "Marmite" album, and I can kinda understand that. Keep Bleeding is a much more consistent album and I can't see why anyone who has enjoyed his music wouldn't like it. I think the most telling praise I can give this album is this: when I saw him play last, at least two of the songs from this album stood out nearly as tall as October Skies - both My Only Friends Are Chemicals and Hurt People Hurt People sounded amazing and I think the audience enjoyed hearing them as much as October Skies. It's a solid album and hard to find fault with - it's probably the Doublecross album I play most often these days.
Format: 12", insert
Tracks: 12
Cost: £10 new
Bought: Jon
When: 24/10/16
Colour: orange
Etching: none
mp3s: download code
