After releasing his second solo album,
The Breaks, in 2014,
Martin Carr underwent some trials and tribulations. Unhappy with the way the album turned out, he spent some fruitless time writing songs for other people, and was rocked by the death of
David Bowie. Like many others at the time, he immersed himself in the life and work of one of his musical heroes. His takeaway was a burning desire to make music that fully expressed his thoughts and feelings. This revelation led to six months of intense work on his own, during which the basics of eight songs were finished. After a period of self-doubt and frustration, he turned to producer
Greg Haver, who had helped him with the "Gold Lift" single in early 2017.
Haver added some new instrumentation to the songs
Carr had almost completed, and
New Shapes of Life was finished. The end result is both something new, like
Carr had planned, and something familiar to fans of his former band,
the Boo Radleys. If
Carr had felt he was writing lyrics that didn't express his true self before, here he paints a clear picture of the conflicts and struggle he was going through while writing the album, and he sings with bracing conviction. It's a change from the days of
the Boos, when the words sometimes seemed secondary to the music the band created. Musically,
Carr and
Haver consciously make the decision to move away from the jangling dream pop of
the Boos and
The Breaks, and only a couple songs, like the rousing "Damocles" and the soaring "Three Studies of the Male Back," look to
Carr's past for inspiration. Instead, much of their album has a modern pop sheen and it's largely guitar-free.
Carr created the sounds by sampling a variety of instruments, then playing them back with a keyboard. Along with his production help,
Haver added synth, percussion and live drums, and as she has on many of
Carr's records, Mary Wycherley adds backing vocals that pop up frequently over the course of the record. Regardless of the process, the pair's sophisticated sound fits the very ballad-heavy album. Most tracks find
Carr spilling his guts over lush piano backing with help from the female backing singers. Sometimes there are big,
Coldplay-lite choruses ("The Main Man") and a little dream pop creeps in (like on the "Hotline Bling"-referencing title track), but mostly it's polished modern balladry that satisfies
Carr's need to express himself lyrically. ~ Tim Sendra