The Heart Strings - 'Jose Fernandez'


The Heart Strings

‘Jose Fernandez’

Life’s losers don’t make great chart material, although Paul Heaton from The Beautiful South made an entire career out of them, and there was always something suspicious about Benny Hill’s Ernie. But regrettably, Guns ’N’ Roses sold sixteen million albums off the back of a nasty attitude and that’s not really going to change anytime soon.

The titular Fernandez is an apparently true tale of a one time trapeze artist who got a bit too big for his poncy silk pumps (true in the Coen Brothers sense of the word, probably) and came a cropper in the most obvious ways. However, much as you’d expect this offering to be full of jaunty circus organ and elephant-trumpet samples, it’s an understated bit of choral whimsy and birds-nest brittle charm. B-side ‘I Hope It Doesn’t Come My Way’ is cut from the same sheet of crepe paper and what we’re left with is about five minutes of heart-breaking loveliness.

The Heart Strings may not have the public persona or the everyman touch that would see them touch the heights like their character does, but they’ll get inside the weft of your brain stems like a delicate spring plug-in from a huge multinational pharmaceutical company. A gleaming sapphire in a bowl full of hoary old chestnuts.

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