I've just been listening to The Night Before. I'm not exactly sure why. It's not particularly good.

 

I'm being honest here. The Night Before isn't a particularly good album. The songs are so-so, the lyrics are lazy and the whole thing is generally overproduced; if I hadn't been told that it was all uploaded to an FTP site and mixed together I may have identified the signs. Lee, as ever, has done a good job producing it, but maybe he's done that too much. It all sounds glossy, polished and too marketable to be proper James.

 

The songs themselves aren't really much cop. It's Hot sounds recycled from various bits of the Hey Ma album (as is most of the album, to be fair), Crazy is touted to be a single but hardly stands up on itself and Porcupine is almost desperately mimsy. Shine has absolutely ridiculous lyrics, and Hero is absolutely awful - Tim, sounding like he has a sore throat, yells lines that could have been ripped off from your average Negro spiritual while the rest of the band prat about in the background, Dave in particular sounding bored with the whole thing as the drums continue to play the same loop ad infinitum.

 

It's true there are some occasional flashes of brilliance in the album - Dr Hellier is reminiscent of Hey Ma, with deliberately political lyrics coupled with a strange medical analogy over a fantastic backing musical track, and Ten Below - my favourite track on the album - is full of genuine emotion; even though it's blatantly about Tim's schooldays, it echoes my own recent experiences with education - "they tell me it's the making of me, that's a fucking lie - when's the holidays?". But these moments are hard to find, marred as they are by the sloppy overall product.

 

The high point for the album, sadly, is the bonus content. All My Letters isn't great - Tim singing the word "bling" doesn't really cut it - but Mother's A Clown is a really good track, with Andy's trumpet bringing it all out with a singalong chorus. And as for Not So Strong, which I added to the tracklisting on my iPod, it's not bad at all.

 

The saddest thing about this album, though, is that you can almost feel James trying to break free and not really managing it. There's very little of the spirit that helped the improvisation of the Seven era, the funk that drove Millionaires or the free-and-easy jollities that infused Hey Ma. The band even stick to their own instruments; I can't hear any vocals that aren't by Tim, whereas, when it came to BGVs on Hey Ma, they were almost spoilt for choice with Larry, Andy, Saul, Jim and Lee all pitching in! James are trying very hard here, but it's almost too hard. They're a great band but all the effort becomes very apparent. They are best when they're loose, and here - when they're deliberately tight - they are at their very worst.

 

So go to the live shows to experience James. Don't listen to this and expect the magnificence that we've experienced recently, because it just isn't present here.

 

And can we please have an acoustic, studio-recorded album next time?