Artist: d Henry Fenton Title: Autumn Sweet Label: Laughing Outlaw File Under: Twang pop Novella Troubadour. RIYL: Michael Penn, some Elvis Costello. Listening to d Henry Fenton’s debut solo release, recorded in North Carolina, is like stepping back in time, somewhere in the late eighties when Michael Penn first made himself known. Penn, known these days more for his brother Sean and his wife Aimee Mann, released an album called March. A combination of honey-sweet vocals, semi-acoustic instrumentation and introspective lyrics gave Penn his only hit, “No myth”, yet his vocal stylings remain unique. At least until I heard Mr Fenton. It’s not that Fenton in any way copies Penn, nor do the liner notes/press release reveal a debt. There’s just something eerily disconcerting listening to a voice that sounds so much a part of one’s past. Irrespective of that, Fenton’s release, his first after the disbanding of Holly Golightly and his move to the US, reveals a poetic soul well suited to his preferred styles of acoustic pop-rock. Produced by Mitch Easter (REM, Pavement etc), this 13 track album highlights Fenton’s knack for telling a story in under three minutes. Lines like “I pick you up as she’s leaving me”, from the opener “Trouble Comes”, are like depth charges dropped almost-slyly into the songs’ fabrics. Fenton treads the singer-songwriter boards well, mixing up almost-acoustic numbers with quicker paced pop, “I’m Not Ready for You” with it’s handclaps and jangley chorus suggesting a well-honed sensibility for the pop song. But the clincher for me is the closing “Jericho’s Horse”, just Fenton’s voice over a strummed guitar, relating in two and a half minutes what some writers take novels to get around to. Like all good work, this album sneaks up on you, straddling the pop-rock-folk boundaries adroitly, and Autumn Sweet holds up well. I was concerned at first by how easily this slotted into the background, but then the bitchslap of Fenton’s lyrics atom bombed the comfortability from the air, and made me focus all the more. If ever there’s a harshest lyric of the year contest, Fenton has it made - “A momentary lapse of concentration lay beside me” just wipes the floor clean.