Southend troubadour David Woodcock is back with a third album of bittersweet vignettes of love and loss set to irresistibly catchy melodies.
Written while the country was trapped in Covid lockdown, a sense of isolation and claustrophobia permeates the record, which is darker and more introspective than his previous releases.
His sound has matured too with backing vocals and layered studio effects adding to the mix and his band The Fixtures – comprising Joe Blamey (drums), Wendy Solomon (bass), Mark Elliott (guitar) and Joe Lamb (percussion) – sounding tighter than ever.
Even Woodcock’s beloved sidekick Barkley the cockapoo gets a credit on one of the tracks, as well as his picture on the album sleeve.
But despite the shift in mood, Woodcock maintains his knack of finding humour and romance among the mundanities of life. Failing relationships, cafe culture and the horrors of social media all come under the microscope of a biting lyricist in the tradition of Ray Davies, Ian Dury and Jarvis Cocker.
The first single from the album, Indifferent, sets the tone. It's a breezy pop song undercut with lyrics about a love affair going bad: "Sorry if I seem unkind, but what's yours ain't ours and what's ours ain't mine."
On Clones, Woodcock rails against joining the herd: “Changing your ways to join in with the pack, There’s no looking forward and you can’t get it back.”
On the album’s title track, he puts fame-hungry Instagrammers in the crosshairs, singing: “I can’t stop taking pictures of me, I’ve decided that I’m a celebrity, but the truth is I’m on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”
Album closer Factory Settings finds Woodcock defeated and in search of a full reboot, lamenting: “Take me back to my factory settings, I wanna start again, I wanna hit reset.”
With Pictures of Me, the Essex riviera's hardest-working musician has created a Modern Life Is Rubbish for the selfie generation.
