Baxter Dury – Happy Soup
Baxter Dury – Happy Soup
Released: 15 August 2011
Genre: Pop
Is Baxter Dury’s third album a reason to be cheerful, part III?
It certainly is, because the son of punk rock icon Ian Dury has produced his strongest and richest body of work to date as well as, coincidentally or not, the set of songs where he sounds most like his late father.
Eschewing his previous use of heavy-duty guitar riffs and trippy psychedelia, Dury Jr mumbles in a dry Cockney monotone over low-level, tootling yet engaging electronica but the joy is in the lyrical detail.
Baxter has a dramatist’s eye for detail, a comedian’s timing and a raconteur’s turn of phrase. Isabel finds him balefully telling an ex-girlfriend “I think my mate slept with you, while you were in Portugal”: on the philosophical Trophies, he wryly reflects that: “Underneath your eyes are the trophies of your life.”
He is about to turn 40, and spends much of Happy Soup mulling over the past Afternoon recalls losing his virginity, while Leak confesses “I was a sexual forest fire, but my flame had been dampened by the monsoons of fear and age” but it’s all far too sharp and upbeat to be a mere mid-life-crisis album. Ironically, in echoing his dad, Baxter Dury has found his own voice.
