The Changing Same: Go to the Movies (Powertools/digital outlets)

Outside of the intermittent career of Sneaky Feelings, Matthew Bannister developed – and sometimes abandoned – any number of other outlets: among them The Dribbling Darts of Love, The Weather, One Man Bannister and albums under his own name like his version of Rubber Soul as Rubber Solo (there was also his Evolver version of Revolver as One Man Bannister) and the most recent setting of lyrics by the American poet Emily Dickinson.

For these purposes we leave aside his academic work and papers, and his book on Front Lawn.

Here again are The Changing Same – Bannister with drummer/keyboard player Bruce Dennis, guitarist John Maydon and bassists Albert Bannister or Graham Sinclair and other guests -- this time exploring, sometimes quite obliquely, the connection between music and movies.

And on the cover the band looking like bit-player thugs from a Fifties B-movie gangster flick.

At his best Bannister invokes the exploratory spirit of the mid Sixties (or those influenced by that period) on songs like the chipper Living in a Bubble, the pop-smart Too Far Gone (Ray Davies-cum-XTC with some Searchers guitar) and The Best Intentions which takes its title from an Ingmar Bergman film: “It's not the things you do, it's the things you leave undone . . . the letter left unopened”.

The moody Lothlorien was a pitch to Lord of the Rings but it's an awkward conflation of narrative and mood which would be a non-starter for the heroic and sometimes bellicose nature of that series. Tolkien rarely brings out the best in songwriters.

Bannister's voice naturally gravities towards a higher register – strained to its, and our, limits on Judgement Day – and is often better and stronger when it drops a little, as on the catchy and enjoyably familiar pop of Sure to Rise (with its nudge of politics).

There are some witty references here as on jaunty Song For Woody which neatly references Dylan's Song to Woody (Guthrie) with “Hey Woody, I wrote you a song” but is about Woody Allen's films with Mia Farrow: “Love and death I've seen it all at 17 in student balls . . .”

Not many writers include “a quick riposte” in their lyrics, or would write a song about the James Ivory/Anthony Hopkins/Kazuo Ishiguro film Remains of the Day. This is not just sharp stuff but the words and ideas are successfully imported into three minute pop-rock songs.

The oddities here are the Eighties funk of Stay on Top, and especially Howl That Daylight Down written and sung by Dennis which sounds like an interloper from a blues-based bar band, probably from somewhere in the provinces. Good enough song, wrong context.

Matthew Bannister is always worth tuning in for, in whatever iteration he appears. And while this album – which sounds very good incidentally, mostly recorded at WinTec in Hamilton where he's on the staff – has a couple of weaker patches the best here is as good as anything in his solo career.

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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here