If last year’s The Early Learnings of. . . , the debut album by this 22-year-old Liverpool-based songwriter, represented the first shoots of promise, its self-titled follow-up sees that potential blossom into something startling and irrefutable. How wonderful — and rare — to hear melodies as rich, complex and serpentine as these, and what a reminder of how, married to lip-smacking lyrics that are acerbic, skittish or forlorn, a melodically forceful song can carry you away. Gliding between modern skiffle, blowsy pop, Kinksian and early-Macca-recalling whimsy, little-boy-lost balladry, droll barbershop and Shadows-like tango, McGuinness sticks like a limpet to first principles: arrangements are busy, words fall over themselves, but not once do you sense him taking his eye off the ball. Like his closest contemporaries, Rufus Wainwright, Damon Albarn, Stephin Merritt, Jens Lekman and Andrew Bird, McGuinness can sometimes come across as arch rather than wry. But that’s a minor cavil about an album that somehow manages to sound both finely crafted and thrillingly spontaneous, that courses with sharp observation, dark allusion and vivid storytelling, that, thanks to songs as exhilarating as Fonz, Atlas, Knock Down Ginger, Nightshift (“You can spend your whole life wrapped around her finger / And some might say that’s f***ing rich coming from me”) and Wendy Wonders, demands to be heard.

Domino WIGCD218

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