Playlouder - Music is the Network

"Its easy to be a cynic. Its easy to doubt all the time. To joke away through your emotional wounds and pretend your doing fine.

It’s easy to mock other people for the sentimental things they do. And detach yourself from your own emotions so you don’t get sentimental too.

The last thing you want is to be like me- too afraid of vulnerability. Its okay to not be strong enough, don’t you be afraid of love"

Insists Paul Hawkins as he speaks to me through my headphones with his raw, almost hectoring, sometimes flat voice.  In the background there’s a plinking piano, some synth strings, a clunking drum pattern, backing vocals.

He’s right you know.

Apparently these uncensored tragic-romantic ramblings belong to the genre known as “antifolk”. It has its own website and everything. Hawkins' take on it has a ramshackle homemade feel, but is also punky and in your face and not giving of any shits.

Check out the sneering edgy groove of opener Unexpected Error, where band Thee Awkward Silences' droning presence can be felt. Maybe I’ve been consuming too much media babble but it sounds like it’s about the credit crunch as the precursor to the end of the world as we know it. Its ace.

The Battle is Over is an epic indie-disco banger that also happens to be an acerbic character study of a young soldier returning from war only to find a world he no longer understands and a girlfriend who doesn’t recognise him. The song is a duet between Hawkins and Dianna de Cabarrus, inspired by Fairytale of New York, and has an “I went and fought a war for you/I never ever asked you to" call-and-response chorus. Its ace.

While Hawkins often uses characters in his songs, you can tell the record is an incredibly personal one. Like a hologram, every fraction of it contains the whole earnest, slightly drunk, highly charismatic man.

He’s not short of ideas, with songs ranging from 9 minute Nick Cave-style murder ballads to musings on how “sometimes it seems that music is my enemy/I loose myself in making songs/avoid reality/I don’t act upon my feelings like ought to”

That last one is over catchy sing-a-long indie that is more often used to express such banalities as fancying a girl or wanting to get drunk. It is, predictably, ace.

Hawkins does fancy girls and he does want to get drunk but he does it in unexpected and witty ways, always with a knack for the propulsive ramshackle pop song. While We Are Not Other People isn't particularly cohesive as an album, and you’ve really got to be in the mood for his abrasive tones, there are some fantastic tracks here.

It appears that the man’s a genius, a rambling outsider with more uniquely British pop nous and intelligence in his one bar-propping elbow than the leather-clad likes of The Libertines had in their whole sorry career. Get him before "the other people" do.