THE BEAUTIFUL SOUTH :- ‘BLUE IS THE COLOUR’ [Sunday Tribune review, October, 1996]

This review first appeared in The Sunday Tribune October 1996

The Beautiful South – Blue is the Colour (Go Discs)

****

With their fifth studio album, The Beautiful South will win no new converts but will hardly over-offend sceptics either with a familiar pot of dead good pop songs fuelled by too much beer and too much naked ire. There is, of course, a rather fine and appealing art to their artlessness, as the single ‘Rotterdam’ and the graceful ‘Blackbird on The Wire’, to name a fine pair, attest. No surprises on here, naturally, except that The Beautiful South have made it so far, so good, to the sound of the so familiar. Either that or they’re way smarter than they’d let you all think.