Baxter Dury – ‘I Thought I Was Better Than You’ album review
“Why am I condemned because I’m the son of a musician?” Baxter Dury snarls in typical fashion on his latest album I Thought I Was Better Than You. It’s a stand-out moment—one of those lyrical slaps that he specialises in, subverting the standards of what we have come to expect from songwriters with a thrilling knack of ditching all tropes and dolling out barely rhyming amusement in the form of quirky yet honest quips.
Once again, I Thought I Was Better Than You is resplendent with these original remarks, and that’s usually enough to push Dury towards five stars on its own. However, 20 years on from Len Parrot’s Memorial Lift, he seemingly finds his songwriting in a slightly uncertain patch. There are strands of narratives mixed with snippets of assorted absurdity, societal commentary that doesn’t quite fully commit, lines of poetic brilliance that yearn for a follow-up, and this creates something slightly messier than the assured perfection he is more than capable of.
The same can be said for the tunes themselves. Neither slick laidback 808-beats nor raucous post-punk skuzz, the music here is always solid but never astounding—teetering between genres interestingly but never achieving a splendid pioneering mix nor delving headfirst into any for a sidewipe that breaks up the play. An urban edge simply isn’t quite enough to allow the listener to infer a vital new page in Dury’s back catalogue. As a result, you can drift away from the track before he suddenly lassos you back in with a quip like, “All the posh girl say ‘yahs’, […] And I sometimes say ‘yahs’.”
However, there are moments when this mishmash knits together magnificently (not that its ever a mess, merely shy of five stars). On ‘Leon’ he does stick to a narrative and it is a fantastically original an honest one. Following Madeline Hart’s sweet intro, a young Dury is accosted by the authorities before playing on the fact that he “is the son of a famous working-class poet.” It’s a triumph of a track, the sort of one where you mutter, ‘I’ve never heard anything like this before’, in other words, the best sort. It exhibits thrilling swagger that signposts Dury’s enthralling singularity.
But then in two track’s time, the record arrives at the moot point of ‘Sincerity’. This half-song takes a promising melody and fizzles it out into a swampy mush of noise as though Dury got self-conscious about its poppiness and decided to curtail it which results in a 1:04 track of filler on a 10-song album. It is a still a great album, nevertheless, but this track is indicative of the lingering sense that it could be more with a touch more of an affirmed direction.
Like ‘Leon’ before it, the final track, ‘Glows’, is another whereby Dury shores-up his intent. In a note of marked divergence, he shuns the urban edge that permeates the rest of the record and leans back on a picked acoustic melody reminiscent of something the decidedly different Adrianne Lenker might play. This delicate ending shows the many strings to Dury’s bows, it’s just on this occasion he perhaps tries to play with too many of those at once.
This results in a great record well worth your time owing to his ability to always be interesting coupled with the melodious listenability of the album, but in years to come, if you’re reaching for Dury in your record collection, this won’t be the first you pluck out.
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