Sam and Henry – Two Troubadours, One Love

If you like your double albums to come tied together with a white ribbon bow, the chances are the aesthetics of Sam and Henry’s release will suit. Bristol-based singer/songwriters Samantha Marais and Henry Dingle met in the city and founded the Coexist Music Collective, comprising like-minded independent artists in the area. Now the pair are re-releasing their recent, separately recorded solo discs as a package.

Two Troubadours, One Love is hence more concept than album. Dingle’s upper case deficient the boy who never learned, the relocated Londoner’s first record, arrives on top, so that’s the one I stick on first. The opening ‘Friday Night / Saturday Morn’ (alas, not an abridged Specials cover) is initially languid but expands into something louder and emptier. This sets the tone for the record; Dingle is more effective when he keeps the sound introspective and the more he pours into each song, the more jarring and less rewarding the listen.

Unfortunately, an honest approach and some decent composing are also undermined, a couple of couplets aside, by lyrics that flicker and fail. From banal (“Now I’m alone / I think of you girl / You were so nice / You were so nice”) to boggling (“I was in the street / It’s 11th century / I was a lovelorn poet and I was so at ease / In a hilltop village in the middle east”), it’s heartfelt but rather daft. This drain on goodwill is a shame, because one or two songs hit the spot. ‘January’ well captures that disorientated, anticlimactic feeling of going back to the grind after Christmas and New Year. The closing ‘Yeah to Capital’, a warped ode to a claustrophobic London, sounds sincere despite his subsequent escape west. Dingle clearly harbours mixed feelings about the city – expressing love for a new-found Dalston on ‘I Woke Up’, full of the optimism of leaving Putney. One of the more memorable tracks, the lyrics here recover from his worst offence to something approaching sense. “I woke up / Went out of the door / Down the steps into the road / I walked along”, he opens, sounding so devoid of all worldly cares you wish he’d acquire some, ASAP. However, something is salvaged from this childish nadir and the song’s simple pay off (“I left my love behind so long ago / I’ve been desperate alone in life / but somehow it couldn’t be a better day”), crowns the spirit of the song very well.

So to Sam Marais and At My Door, her second album and the other half of Two Troubadours, One Love. Both of these CDs have slightly unsettling starts but Dingle’s discordant chimes are out-weirded by ‘The Luckiest One’, twenty seconds of playground chant over ballerina box tune. It tees up ‘Cool Breeze’, which immediately illustrates the key contrast between the two singers – he is laden and she is airy light. The song floats along but rather peters out towards the end and the album’s early impetus ebbs away altogether on the next offering, the primitive and prayer-like ‘My Eternity’. The album is overly pale in places, a little static and stilted, reaching for the ether but falling inoffensively short. That said, the double-tracked lullaby vocals of ‘Moonchild’ are rather affected and annoying, as is irritatingly sing-song ‘Black Swan’ and its cringy, kooky-by-numbers spoken outro. Most songs are pleasant enough – ‘Home’, ‘At My Door’ and closing instrumental ‘Moth in Flight’ among them, although the latter, pretty and peaceful, is progressively less reminiscent of actual moth aeronautics. The most successful song on the album is ‘A Little of You’, refreshing, low-key and enjoyable, with sweet melodies and instrumental twiddles.

I wish there was something more than ribbon tying together this double release – they perform each others’ songs, apparently, and play together. Because these records pre-date the pair’s forming, however, it’s only an ethos that is shared. That collective, acoustic, poetic spirit is admirable and pleasing, perhaps more so than the music – but the two albums are complementary rather than united. These two troubadours possess potential but One Love is an insubstantial listen – transiently diverting but ultimately disposable.