Paul Smith

Paul Smith, frontman of Maxïmo Park, has gone solo, at least for the time being. By doing so he joins ranks with the likes of Fran Healy from Travis, Brandon Flowers from The Killers and Kele from Bloc Party, all frontmen who recently released their first solo albums.

Mr Smith recently announced that the release of a book of pictures will coincide with the album release. “Thinking in Pictures” will consist of pictures taken on tour with Maximo Park.

Released on his own small label Billingham records, Margins is a very sympathetic story, hard to dislike in its earnestness. It’s also easy get just a bit irritated by the same earnestness. When it’s good, it is very good. But sometimes it becomes a bit too earnest and sincere, falling into the already overcrowded jar of cliches labelled “young man with guitar and an effects pedal”- like the very stripped down Pinball.
But that is the exception. What will stand out the most on the album are the unpolished Northern little pop gems you will find in songs like North Atlantic Drift and Strange Fiction.

By a coincidence, I was reading David Nicholls’ Starter for Ten when listening to this album, and it became a perfect soundtrack to the searching young man in the book, struggling to find wisdom, struggling to get the girl and dreaming of drinking red wine at big wooden tables and kicking piles of fallen autumn leaves on long walks. Since most people have a period of their life that they want to spend doing those very things, the album is bound to find its listeners, someting that the already sold out tour could be proof of.