ANDY BULL – WE’RE TOO YOUNG

Lauded by locals as a kind of renaissance kid, Sydney’s Andy Bull is riding a very fast train to pop stardom, not least because of his boyish good looks (complete with magnetic Rod Stewart mullet) and his dexterous voice. This album is colourful, without a doubt – Bull’s songs bounce along like the bastard child of Stevie Wonder and the Jackson 5, produced with a very ‘noughties sheen by Tony Bouchen. Andy’s style is about encapsulating a kind of buoyant nostalgia and distilling it into high-energy soul performance – so much so that at times it feels as though his hyper-fuelled melodramatics get slightly out of hand – in single Young Man, he sounds as though he’s been injected with a strain of 1970s RnB steroids. His hazy-eyed youthful optimism comes through in the candy kitsch of Girls and summer dub chill-out One Thing You Should Know. Genuinely affecting is You Make It So Hard To Love You, tapping into that kind of modern heart-on-sleeve piano-man sentiment that Ben Folds made so popular, via the Motown balladry of The Wiz. It’s for sure that Andy Bull is doing something right; Island Records seem to think so. Though this high-concept, highly constructed album may leave some of the music community with just a smidge too much saccharine on the palate.

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