Calm down now: there’s nothing to see here. It’s just some tunes, you see. Courtesy of two blokes from Denmark.
Known to their friends as the somewhat unpronounceable Sebastian Hxeg Gulmann and Peter Neergaard Henrichsen, [a]Port Friendly[/a] don’t have a drummer or a bass player. Because these things make noise. Instead, they both sing and, while Sebastian, um, belts out riffs on his nylon string guitar, Peter is the man behind the more butch-sounding steel-stringed guitar and piano.
So, obviously, second album ‘Lordship Lane’ is a slowie. Everything about it is as simple – as the hushed murmurs of tracks – it includes. No elaborate cover, – no major label backing and certainly no glitzy marketing campaign. Perhaps it’s as much of – a clichi in the opposite direction but [a]Port Friendly[/a] really are all about the tunes.
And they’ve got some fine ones here, laid bare before us in their skeleton forms. They’re fairly indistinguishable from one another, but each is elegantly beautiful in its understatement. ‘Changing Man’ resembles Nick Cave, sweetened and unplugged, while the rest are the closest you’ll get to Denmark’s answer to Belle & Sebastian.
Give it time, in fact, and you could really love this.