Little Name, How to Swim and Live

Did cartoon dog icon Droopy try to step back into the limelight via the British indie music scene? Where is E!’s True Hollywood Story on this momentous event? More importantly, how did a cartoon character manage to step into reality? Nope, false alarm — it’s just Little Name’s debut album, How to Swim and Live. Liverpool’s Lee Barker, aka Little Name, recently escaped eight years of panic-attack induced isolation with the help of his music. Sick of hearing the same old Britpop, Barker craved to create something better. It was his goal to have music with “greater themes, songs that said something about his life.” Right…

How to Swim and Live features a mix of indie-pop, lounge music, and sad vocals that amuses me in ways that music shouldn’t amuse people. “For the Attention Of” is really an inauspicious start, consisting of the dreadful sound of synthesized trumpets and nasally vocals overlaying electric guitars. Thankfully, Barker’s voice opens up later on, allowing him to mutter unsympathetic lyrics about isolation and vulnerability or cheeky Morrissey-esque ripoffs. Songs like “Picked Out the Line” and “This Was Your Place of Birth” sound like the rejected lyrical scraps of Morrissey. Barker also does his best Morrissey impression in the miserable “Nobody Loves You,” where Barker claims, “I always thought it was easier / to get away with murder / than to get through to you.” Barker can’t quite pull off Moz’s ability to insult you while simultaneously making you love him, however. In fact, the more you listen to this CD, the less and less you like Barker.

It really feels as if Barker didn’t know what he wanted to do here. So many of the songs lack a true introduction, none more obvious than “Tracy and I,” which immediately makes you feel as if you’ve missed the first 15 seconds of the song. Even worse is the fact that everything sounds the same — the same chord patterns and sometimes the same chord, as seen in “I Always See the Sun Rise” and “How to Swim and Live,” two consecutive tracks that don’t even transition into each other but share identical guitar parts and droning drum patterns. When you’re not being attacked with monotony, you’re being hit with the bland, synthesized sound of the fake orchestra. It just doesn’t sound like he’s trying.