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From The Desk Of Del Amitri’s Justin Currie: Don Paterson’s “Rain”

CurrieLog01002b83There will always be a small bunch who will never forgive Justin Currie for the sins of his former band, Del Amitri. Namely, the speed and vigor with which the group abandoned the angular new-wave-ish promise of its 1985 self-titled debut for more conventional pop inroads. Currie makes no apologies for the 17 years and five albums of smart, well-executed, comparatively middle-of-the-road Brit Invasion melodies and country-rock yearnings that followed. It even netted him and his Scottish bandmates an American hit, “Roll To Me,” in 1995. Nowadays, Currie is still living in Glasgow while nurturing an intermittent solo career that now includes The Great War (Ryko). Coming eight years after Del Amitri’s last album, it resurrects the reassuring jangle of that band as it continues Currie’s middle-age explorations of the darker recesses of the male love muscle (i.e. the heart). Currie will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our Q&A with him.

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Currie: I had begun to reconcile myself to the idea that Don Paterson would never, could never, write anything to match his first three collections. I would have been content with those three and the more playful musings of his books of aphorisms. I should have known from the title—the temerity of using the cheapest, most obvious and yet still most poetic word in the English language: Rain. The two poems that bracket the book, “Two Trees” and “Rain” are instantly comprehensible and enormously affecting. Within them lie an array of tonal and narrative pieces that cohere into a sort of symphonic theme: the emptiness of the universe, the implied redundancy of the human lives within it and the beautiful brief flicker that is love in this great expanse of time. Or maybe it’s just about rain.

Video after the jump.