Product Description

Track listing 1. Who's Gonna Tell 2. Closer Than Most 3. Just Checkin' 4. Hit Parade 5. Masculine Eclipse 6. Til You Can't Tuck It In 7. If We Crawl 8. Tupperware Queen 9. Half Hearted Get (Is Second Best) 10. River 11. Baby Please Go 12. You Can Call Me Leisure 13. Final Spark 14. 10000 Feet 15. Hot On The Heels Of Heartbreak 16. Mediterranean 17. Little Piece Of Advice 18. Property Quiz 19. Chicken Wings

Track Listing

1. Who's Gonna Tell?
2. Closer Than Most
3. Just Checkin'
4. Hit Parade
5. Masculine Eclipse
6. 'Til You Can't Tuck It In
7. If We Crawl
8. Tupperware Queen
9. Half Hearted Get (Is Second Best)
10. The River
11. Baby Please Go
12. You Can Call Me Leisure
13. Final Spark
14. 10,000 Feet
15. Hot On The Heels Of Heartbreak
16. The Mediterranean
17. A Little Piece Of Advice
18. Property Quiz
19. Chicken Wings

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #49251 in Music
• Released on: 2007-03-19
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Explicit Lyrics
• Running time: 73 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
The Beautiful South are one of the few bands who have always managed to be AOR without venturing too far into MOR. Painting It Red is no exception. The tunes are all radio-ready pop but, as is typical of the Beautiful South, the lyrics pack a bit of a kick. Moreover, as the band members gets older, so do their themes. So while they are singing about love like a proper pop group should, the words "husband", "wife" and "partner" pop up quite a bit (three words you would be hard-pressed to find uttered by their teenage peers in the charts). Elsewhere, they sing about relationships amid expanding waistlines and greying hairs ("'Til You Can't Tuck It In"), backaches ("If We Crawl") and loveless marriages ("Final Spark"). Theirs has never been a particularly cheery lot in life, but even by the Beautiful South's standards, Painting It Red is a dark album. Reality is a bitter pill to swallow, so it's fortunate that the Beautiful South wrap it up in sugar. --Ted Kord

CD Description
After making a career performing sweet pop music disguisingacerbic lyrical sniping, with their seventh album the Beautiful South find themselves in a more uptempo and even grown-up mood than their last record. Reining in their lyrics morethan previously, a move that allows them to incorporate metaphors without the funny, snarky subtexts that they often carry, the band have created their most mature album to date. The album is also notable for Norman Cook's appearance on several tracks--better known by his alter-ego of Fatboy Slim, Cook used to play bass in the South's previous incarnation as the Housemartins.
Standouts include "Closer than Most",which adds some slithering keyboards and a dose of funk to the band's oeuvre, "Baby Please Go", featuring some great vocal exchanges between Paul Heaton and Dave Hemingway, and "10,000 Feet", which pairs low-key verses with barreling musical bridges. The best track, however, is "The Mediterranean",an unassuming track evocative of a wholly unrealistic, but nonetheless crystalline vision of the body of water in question. Collectors might want to note that the UK edition of this album features three additional songs.

Customer Reviews

Still painting it red
What can I say? I loved this. My only complaint is that at 19 tracks it can be a bit of an endurance test- if it had been pruned a bit (removing 'The River', 'Masculine Eclipse', 'Chicken Wings' and 'Hit Parade' jump to mind) it would have been even better. But still, the South are one of the best and most honest bands out there. They're always seen as gloomy, but I've always thought this was a misnomer for the band that produced 'Perfect 10', 'Prettiest Eyes' and, on this record, 'Til You Can't Tuck It In' (the only real love song ever produced by a pop group) and 'The Mediterranean'. They're still the best.

You�re glumly forced to admit they�re telling the truth
You've been drinking too much and depriving her of the time you said you'd spend with her. It's all there, in this album's lyrics. In the end, you're glumly forced to admit they're telling the truth. And it hurts, because when The Beautiful South sing the truth, they make no attempt to dress it up in cosy little euphemisms.

"We still got closer than most" rings the central line of Closer Than Most, the album's first single and second track, but the edge of guilt in Paul Heaton's voice suggests this is only half the story and we're left to guess the other half. Later on "Love takes time, we all agree" is followed up by "but time's not the easiest to please". Moments of unbearable poignancy here are levied with humour, as is the norm on a Beautiful South album, although the humour here is a few shades darker. The overall mood is resignation that this is as good as life's going to get. And the band breaks all the rules of the Pop Album in getting their message across.

Rule One - all pop albums must start with a cheery number. With this (obviously not) in mind, Painting It Red opens with Who's Gonna Tell, a serious meditation on the ageing process and how most of us go into denial. No self-help manual ever contained truer words than the following - "it's the news that everyone dreads, you're no longer painting it red".

Yes, the truth hurts, no matter how you choose to dress it up. While 1998's Quench was The Beautiful South at their pop-friendly best, Painting It Red is easily their most fully realised album. Everything fits beautifully. There might be fat on the bones of the ordinary joes they sing about but there's no flab on this album. Indeed, Painting It Red might be the album, which puts the beautiful into Beautiful South. On songs like the gorgeous Masculine Eclipse, Paul Heaton and Jacqui Abbot's voices become one as never before, showing two sides to each emotion and two angles of approach for each argument and in the bits in between they illustrate without saying out loud that these are the reasons why men and women are, what they give to each other, and more importantly, what they hold back.

Having assumed the role of the alcoholic rake with talent, who's realised he can't go on any longer than this and is bent on warning others of the dangers that lie down this path of life on Quench Heaton here, as both a writer and a singer, comes on as a sort of regretful guardian angel. There's ample proof of my argument in Who's Gonna Tell and, less obviously, in Just Checkin', but the clearest proof has to be in Hit Parade ("that tune's not mine, it's Kenny Paul's", indeed), where Heaton puts his arm around your shoulder and takes you on a metaphorical pub crawl through his greatest heroes and influences - musical and otherwise. It's an invigorating trip, made all the more welcome by Heaton's unusual willingness to let his guard down so that you the listener can see the real him. Despite being a band effort, this is very much Paul Heaton's album.

Still great
As someone whose followed the Beautiful South for 7 years now, I eagerly awaited the release of Painting It Red as I do with all their albums. I have to admit, its by no means their best (Miaow still can claim that honour), but Paul and Dave R still manage to write good song after good song and after a few listens the album instantly grew on me. 'You Can Call Me Leisure' is genius, as is 'Hot On The Heels Of Heartbreak' and 'Property Quiz', which nobody else ever seems to mention but it features a great vocal by Paul. It would be nice if they would experiment a bit now and again, but at the end of the day, you always know what to expect with a Beautiful South album and so you never really want them to change. The album hasn't sold very well but so what? Those who have bought it know they've purchased a good album. I saw them live at Brixton last Tuesday (12th Dec), and was suprised by how many old tracks they did. Whether this was due to Jacqui's departure or not I don't know but it would have been nice to have heard some of the new stuff live. But they managed to cope without her well enough (Paul and Dave H singing 'Perfect 10' was a highlight!). It will be interesting to see where they go from here after Jacqui leaving, but you can always guarantee that Paul and Dave R will not stop doing what they are good at - writing great songs.