Hugh Featherstone Blyth - Largo mp3 album

Of special note on this album was the stark, spartan piano-led sound of "sunset" which rings sweet'n'sour in my head to this very day. Comparisons are odious, but I still can't help making an immediate association with the Beatles' "the long and winding road", not only for the effect of the piano but also for the intense emotional charge accumulating from the arrangement of music, vocal and lyrics.Actually, the comparison is quite useful here in that it points to some of Hugh's artistic strengths: whereas "the long and winding road", one of the great masterpieces of modern popular music, is lyrically and poetically quite vague (what is this road, and to who's door should it lead? etc.), Hugh's lyrics are much more complex, concrete, complete. He still leaves room for the listener's imagination to fill in the narrative and emotional gaps, and thus carries on the tradition of story-teller and bard.In fact, most of his songs tell a story, sometimes quite domestic and close-to-home, sometimes epic. The poetry, apart from being built on a superstructure of rich reference and allusion (which is what we expect from top-notch poetry), is very visual. For me, many of the songs could very well be filmscripts. Just look at how many times he mentions light.