Dave House - See That No One Else Escapes

See That No One Else Escapes was the first Dave House album I bought. Six months later I bought his debut solo album, Kingston's Current, on my first ever trip to Kingston. I'm still yet to pick up a copy of his third and final solo album, although I really should. I suspect I'll enjoy it.

I bought this album after seeing Dave support Lemuria in Bar Sigma in Swansea the summer before I left South Wales for London. The Arteries played too. I've got a feeling the poster for that show was great, and a few people I know had copies of it up on their walls. Possibly involving a swan? I enjoyed Dave's set and asked him which album I should pick up after the show. He suggested this one and sold it to me for £5, a bargain by any measure.

My first impression was that it was more mellow than I remember his set being, but I wonder if the songs took a more punk edge given the setting and the bands on the bill. All D's No Future is the first song on the album that has anything punk to it, but Trafalgar Square to Anywhere shows that his songs could be great without being heavy - the chorus there is perfect. For an Afternoon could easily fit on the first Frank Turner record (I remember Frank blocking my view for a lot of the time at the Dave House vs Dave Hause show in The Fighting Cocks in 2011; that guy is tall) and Old Girl Back made me think about The Klaxons for the first time in at least a decade.

Over the years, it's had far fewer plays than Kingston's Current, but that's mostly because I have mp3s of that album but not this one, and it has the title-track, which is a really incredible song that I still can't get enough of. I should give this one more time though. It's generally a bit softer, but the violins (which feature in a lot of the songs) really add to those songs, and actually some of the highlights of Kingston's Current are the softer songs too.

Format: 12"
Tracks: 11
Cost: £5 new
Bought: Gig, Swansea
When: 10/06/09
Colour: Grey marble swirl
Etching: none
mp3s: none

Dave House - Kingston's Current

The first time I heard Dave House was when he supported Lemuria in Swansea's Bar Sigma. The Arteries opened the show and there was a good crowd of people I knew there that night - Lemuria had got a bit of a buzz going, and we seemed to see The Arteries pretty much weekly back then. I enjoyed Dave's set and bought a copy of See That No One Else Escapes at the end of the show. I think I asked him which album to go for, and he recommended that one; I went through a phase of asking which album to buy at the merch table, sandwiched between phases of buying the ones with the best covers (who says you shouldn't judge a book by its cover?).

Six months later I'd moved to London and just discovered Banquet Records in Kingston (a story documented in detail here). On that first trip, I bought a copy of Lemuria's First Collection and Kingston's Current by Dave House on cd. Those two releases were linked to Banquet Records in ways I wouldn't realise for a while to come - I'd bought the cd of Lemuria's first proper album, Get Better, in Spillers about a year earlier, a cd that Banquet themselves had put out. Dave House, who I'd first seen supporting Lemuria, used to work in Banquet (and possibly still did when I bought the cd). I wouldn't find this out for another year or so, having replaced another longtime Banquet staff member in a house share in Surbiton, and getting to know JT and Mike and co through him. If this story didn't need yet another set of semi-related anecdotes, I also bought an Above Them split 7" on that first trip to Banquet; that 7" contained photos of a very drunken night out we'd had with the guys in Above Them in Bar Sigma on the only other time I went there. I knew none of these (tenuous) connections that day when I first let Banquet Records begin to change my life.

Anyway, some years later Kingston's Current got a vinyl reissue for Record Store Day. By this point I'd just moved to Oxford but was back in Kingston a few days after RSD and popped into Banquet to see if they had any of the records Truck hadn't got in. I think this had actually been a release from a previous year, because I got it for the bargain price of £5 (the same price I paid for the cd). I was pleased to add it to my collection, partly because it's a good album, but mostly because the title-track is by far my favourite Dave House song. There was something nice about getting that song, singing the praises of Kingston so nicely, either end of my time in Surbiton/South London. I'm a sucker for acoustic punk-rock and gang-vocals.

The strongest songs on the album are often the more lamentful - Weeknights and Weekends and Stereo are both great, slower songs. I'm not 100% sold on the electronic beats used elsewhere, but perhaps that's because my introduction to Dave's music was as an acoustic singer at a punk-rock show. I didn't notice until I was taking the pictures below that the insert is numbered in pencil and mine is #3/250. I wonder who has #1 and #2?

Format: 12", numbered (3\250), insert
Tracks: 10
Cost: £5 new
Bought: Banquet Records, Kingston
When: 21/04/14
Colour: White
Etching: none
mp3s: none