Experience can be a funny thing in music. Have too little and you don’t know what you’re doing; accumulate 35 years of it and there’s a danger you know exactly what you’re doing, right down to the last tasteful guitar note. Paul Frazer Clarke’s The Chalk Outline occasionally brushes against that problem, but there’s enough genuine songwriting underneath the polish to keep things interesting.
The fourth release from Clarke’s Five Coordinates EP, The Chalk Outline features Scottish songwriter Charlie Grant and lands somewhere between old-school indie, sophisticated pop and the sort of beautifully constructed songwriting that Prefab Sprout made look irritatingly effortless.
Real guitars, drums and bass give the track a warmth that’s becoming increasingly welcome in an age when perfectly serviceable songs can arrive sounding like they’ve been assembled entirely inside a laptop. Clarke’s production is pristine without completely removing the fingerprints, while the guitar work adds little flashes of personality around the vocal rather than constantly demanding attention.
There’s certainly some John Mayer in that approach. The guitar isn’t there simply to provide chords; it comments on the song. Elsewhere, there’s a little of Sting’s later reflective work in the restraint and an obvious appreciation for classic songwriting where melody remains more important than whatever production trick happens to be fashionable this month.
Charlie Grant’s involvement makes sense. His songwriting background brings another experienced hand to something already constructed with considerable care, and there’s very little wasted movement. Clarke clearly understands arrangement after decades spent writing, producing and composing across records, film, television and media.
But that professionalism also exposes the track’s main weakness.
Everything sits exactly where you’d expect it to. The guitars sound good, the rhythm section is controlled, the melodies resolve properly and nothing threatens to derail proceedings. That’s excellent craftsmanship, but relationship uncertainty isn’t tidy. A moment where the arrangement genuinely cracks — a rougher vocal, an unexpected guitar eruption or something deliberately unresolved — could have made the emotional instability of the lyric bleed further into the music.
Prefab Sprout were masters of sophisticated pop, but beneath that sophistication there was often something strange, sad or slightly uncomfortable. That’s the territory Clarke should push towards. He’s already demonstrated that he can make a beautifully assembled record. The more interesting question is how much damage he’s willing to allow inside it.
That criticism comes precisely because the fundamentals here are strong.
Clarke’s CV stretches from deals with Epic Records, MCA Music and Warner Chappell to writing for television and collaborating with musicians including Lucky Oceans and Jeff Lorber. He’s also credited with co-writing and co-producing what is described as the first drum and bass album. That’s a wonderfully peculiar route to arrive at a melodic indie-pop song about a relationship quietly falling apart.
Yet The Chalk Outline doesn’t feel like somebody waving a lengthy industry résumé at you. Its priorities are refreshingly straightforward: melody, musicianship and storytelling.
There’s something decidedly unfashionable about that, and we mean it as a compliment.
The next step would be allowing a little more unpredictability into all that experience. The track doesn’t need additional production for the sake of sounding contemporary; if anything, it needs the opposite. Leave a scar visible. Let a guitar sound slightly dangerous. Allow the uncertainty within the words to contaminate the immaculate surface.
As it stands, The Chalk Outline is intelligent, warm and confidently written old-school indie-pop from someone who clearly knows exactly how songs work.
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