The Life & Soul new album from Mamas Gun
aaamusic | On 14, Apr 2011
Mamas Gun to release sophomore album ‘The Life & Soul’ on June 6th on Candelion Records.
Since releasing their debut album ‘Routes To Riches’ in late 2009, Mamas Gun have toured Europe and Japan where they achieved a number 3 sales slot in the Japanese Billboard charts.
The new album has been produced by Grammy Award winning production team Martin Terefe and Andreas Olsson (Jason Mraz, Train, James Morrison, KT Tunstall and Jamie Cullum) earlier this year. It is a revelation in that it borrows a myriad of identifiable influences and yet seems to inhabit a world all of its own.
Lead Singer and songwriter Platts, suggests that The Life & Soul has more of a rock edge and is more melody driven than its predecessor. “Sonically, the first record was a collage of everything I had written up to that point”, he says. “And it took six months to record. This one we used the same set up for every song and recorded it all in one room. It took two months to write and five weeks to record.”
Love in all its (re)incarnations is an abiding theme on ‘The Life & Soul’: Only One, co-written by and featuring Beverley Knight, is about Knight’s brother and the girl he’d always wanted to be with; focus track On A String which recalls the bright-eyed soul of James and Bobby Purify’s I’m Your Puppet, is about serendipity or at least knowing that if you bumped into someone for a second time you’d be helpless to her whim; We Make It Look So Easy is about finding the right one; and best of all is Sending You A Message which tells the story of his Grandparents, a doctor and nurse, who were separated during the Second World War and found themselves only able to communicate via telegram.
Elsewhere on ‘The Life & Soul’ the writing remains reassuringly enigmatic; the apocalyptic Inferno takes its inspiration from a song on Jeff Buckley’s Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk album and is, according to Platts, about “setting things in motion which become inevitable”; Rocket To The Moon (co-written with bass player Horan) has a James Brown/Stevie Wonder/Michael Jackson edge to it and the be-careful-what-you-wish-for sentiment is only magnified by the imagery of revellers dancing in a spacecraft that this song surely conjures up; Heavy Hands – a co-write with Ellie Goulding’s Starry Eyed writer Jonny Latimer that features a lovely metaphor about “climbing ladders in the rain” -concerns someone with an insane amount of optimism, this contrasting with Platts’ own cynical view on life; and the magnificent composition The Art which speculates on death and what it must feel like to lose someone close.
The album will be available to buy digitally and physically at all good retail outlets and will be preceded by single release of ‘On A String’ on 2nd May.
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