Paddy McAloon - I Trawl The Megahertz

Prefab Sprout have always been a truly special band, their leader Paddy McAloon is one of the greatest geniuses contemporary music has ever had, creating original, intelligent, sophisticated and emotional pop songs, taking much further, in an Eighties post-new wave enviroment, Steely Dan's intuitions about pop being accessible and yet amazing through unpredictable chord changes, soul and jazz attitude and rich instrumentation. His music is where you can hear Burt Bacharach, Stevie Wonder and The Go-Betweens (and much more) at the same time.
There is also a soundtrack element in many Prefab Sprout songs, the tunes and the way they're orchestrated wouldn't be out of place as an intense score for a movie, and while Prefab Sprout's more recent releases were made more and more of perfectly well formed pop songs about love, this first Paddy McAloon solo album is mostly instrumental, magnificently orchestrated and finally reveals the genius as the potentially greatest soundtrack writer ever, the dream of a movie director... if I made a movie I'd write a contract with my blood to have music like this scoring it.
There have been many rumours in the past of McAloon having hours and hours of unreleased adventurous music projects, like a box set about the history of the world, or an instrumental album called I Trawl The Megahertz about voices from the radio. At some point it was believed they were just legends and there was nothing true. Well, now we have this album and we can see at least one rumour was founded. Here there aren't pop songs, this is contemporary music of the highest quality.
The concept behind the album is really emotional and I'd let explain it to the words of Mc Aloon himself, from the booklet of the CD:

Paddy Mc Aloon: I Trawl The Megahertz seems to be a portrait of a woman who is trying to make sense of her life by reviewing selected memories. She is like someone with their hand on a radio dial, tuning into distant stations, listening to fragments of different broadcasts... In 1999 I went through a period of ill health that meant I was unable to write music in my usual manner... the problem was eye surgery followed by shingles followed by eye surgery... so, unable even to read I passed the time by listening to and taping all kinds of TV and radio programmes, concentrating on phone-ins, phrases that originated in different time zones and different frequencies would team up to make new and oddly affecting sentences... it was organising what I had collected into something that was part love song and part lament. Have you an idea how many sad stories are floating over the airwaves after midnight?

So we have the touching title track, 22 minutes long, with a superb orchestration, a really melancholic theme recurring and evolving and the voice of Yvonne Connors reading phrases which speak of really sad and poetic stories... "I said: your daddy loves you very much, he just doesn't want to live with us anymore" or "Oblivious to the opinions of neighbours I will bark to the moon like a dog"...
This masterpiece is followed by wonderful shorter tracks which are entirely instrumental, where sometimes a theme returns but mostly there are amazing melodic evolutions, they have all great orchestral performances and reveal McAloon as the Morricone of the 21st century.
Anyway there are two more tracks with voices, one is I'm 49, which seems like an appendix of the title track, voices from the radio start saying "Do you feel completely abandoned and lost? What's wrong? I'm 49, divorced...".
The other track is Sleeping Rough, and this time the voice is the sublime voice of Paddy McAloon, singing "I'm lost... I'll grow a long and silver beard... and let it reach my knees. I'm lost... and duty will not track me down... asleep among the trees", and while we see now the beard has finally gone, at the turn of the millennium he actually did grow a very long and silver beard...
Believe me, it's one of the most touching moments in music history, the melody, the lyrics and the way he sings, rarely music has seen such emotional music... I think of Billie Holiday singing I'm A Fool To Want You at the end of her glorious but troubled life, or Bjork singing Scatterheart in Dancer In The Dark... I don't think there's anything else that can be compared to this. Sleeping Rough is an unvaluable precious gem, it's just a pity it won't be heard from the pop masses usually purchasing Prefab Sprout albums.
Mc Aloon says this album is a one off, he doesn't plan a solo career, he's working on the next Prefab Sprout album, and while I can't wait for it to listen again to their perfect pop I also hope more of those legendary solo works will surface one day, if only they're as good as a small fraction of I Trawl The Megahertz it's unfair they stay unreleased.

Rating: 9/10