Daniel Pearson -‘Satellites.’ (Saint in the City Records)

At some point in the last couple of years I reached saturation point with singer-songwriters. There may be those who would bault at the idea of a blogger using a phrase like ‘Unique Selling Point’ but the problem was that my inbox became full of perfectly nice records made by people of either sex that were not bad records but lacked an edge to make it something special.

However, it would appear that a youth spent listening to US Alternative rock has paid off, meaning that although he sounds English, he has more in common with the ‘alt. indie/folk/rock’ singer-songwriters as typified by Elliott Smith than, say, David Gray or the bland imitators who followed him.

As you might expect, it’s a reflective record, but thankfully pretty short on navel-gazing moments of the ‘woe is me’ variety. Although the opening notes of ‘masquerade’ suggest it might be yet another singer-songwriter record, from ‘Wishing Well’ onwards it is clear that Pearson is working from a much more diverse palette than many of his peers. Closing track ‘It’s Been A While’ starts as a gentle strum-a-long but builds into something much more.

It doesn’t re-write the rulebook, but there’s enough going on here to make it a cut above much of the competition, and hopefully he will continue to grow on suebsequent releases.

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Satellites is out now on Saint In The City Records.