Consumer Guide Album

The Beautiful South: Carry On Up the Charts: The Best of the Beautiful South [Mercury, 1995]
Though Paul Heaton isn't the first or last pop aesthete to tense dark lyrics against lite music, not many have a) set up disparities as stark as "I love you from the bottom of my pencil case" or b) gone so literally pop with them. I don't want to make too much of his common touch, which is limited to England, where his extreme Englishness seems (somewhat) less exotic--not many Stateside have sampled the three albums that yield 10 of these tracks, and no one has heard them on the radio. But from Randy Newman's liberal elitism to Stephin Merritt's camp, American practitioners of this strategy like to pretend they're putting something over. So maybe Heaton's pop credibility is a reward for his sincere belief that the same people who suck up sweet music have an appetite for bitter sentiments. And maybe he seems so much deeper than Ben Folds because he's never snide. Sarcastic, bloody well right. Fond of his own cleverness, he'll drink to that. Tuneful, that's his fookin job. But pissed off to the heart. A-