Album Review: EXPLORERS CLUB – Rarities Vol 1

February 4th, 2021 by brianmc

Gold Star Recordings [Release date 05.02.21]

Explorers Club dropped two acclaimed new albums last year (To Sing And Be Born Again/Explorers Club). We reviewed both. In their own way they proved that Sixties Pop is timeless.

Jason Brewer, the band’s retro pop wunderkind, has used that success as motivation to assemble an album of tracks that missed the 2020 cut, titled Rarities, Volume 1.
Why they were discarded is a puzzle. This is a strong, strong album, filled with high calibre outtakes and obscure singles, now dusted down and polished up.

Cleverly, Brewer has constructed the album around 3 key covers. Two of them of infectiously emblematic sixties’ pop hits – ‘Hitchin A Ride’, a joyfully faithful cover of the Vanity Fare 1969 single, from the pen of prolific UK hit writer, Mitch Murray; the second, ‘Stormy’, a no.5 US Billboard hit in 1968 – and the third a cover of a classic Bacharach/ David song, ‘Walk On By’, originally sung by the incomparable Dionne Warwick.

The original material holds up well against these benchmark pop classics… when you’re in exalted company you stretch yourself that little bit further, you push yourself that little bit harder. Head turners, ‘Anticipatin’ and ‘No Good To Cry’ are gutsy pop songs, both brimful of the shiny pop immediacy that Brewer creates in the studio.

But there are half a dozen songs here that even in their quiter moments inspire feelings of joy and love, much in the same manner as Bacharach’s celebratedly evocative material.
The cool, sophisticated ‘Run Run’ and the lazily drifting, ‘Sweet Delights’ are the most obvious, songs graced with complex rhythms, muted brass and tastefully deployed bgvs.
And then the whispered themes of ‘Weight Of The World’, combined with ‘Summer Days’ moodily lyrical nostalgia, present us with a welcome opportunity to return to a warmly inviting, pandemic free world, if only for a few minutes.

Maybe Brewer’s 15 minutes just hasn’t come round yet, but at this rate it must be soon.
***1/2

Review by Brian McGowan

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