Seafieldroad – Seafieldroad

Released almost exactly a year after his debut as Seafieldroad (itself released a mere six months after Swimmer One’s Dead Orchestras), Andrew Eaton-Lewis’s latest makes this stately adult-pop piano-ballad bag look effortless – though to be fair, he’s been at it a while, with hundreds of home-recorded albums already on tape. On this self-titled release, evocative titles like What Became of Pinky and Honker are backed ably by Eaton-Lewis’s redolent croon and deftly sketched narratives.

Though erudite, Eaton-Lewis evidently knows not the meaning of the words ‘diminishing returns’, as this is a comfortable improvement on There Are No Maps For This Part of the City, despite operating from roughly the same stable.The only real complaint is its brevity – just seven songs, plus a nicely-arranged cover of Empire of the Sun’s Walking on a Dream – but at the rate he works, album three is no doubt already on the horizon.