James’ Shamelessly Nostalgic A-Z Of Albums That He Liked To Listen To When He Was Young – Part 17: Quench

And so to ‘Q’ in my A-Z of albums I liked to listen to when I was young.

‘Q’ is always one of the more difficult letters in an A-Z challenge.

And it was quite the conundrum in this challenge too.

Not as difficult to solve as ‘X’ in the end but still quite tricky.

Fortunately there was one album from 1998 that came to the rescue.

Q is for Quench

Born out of the remnants of 80s band The Housemartins, The Beautiful South were oft labelled as ‘everyone’s second favourite band’.

Which is a back-handed compliment if ever there was one, the obvious implication being that  most people quite liked The Beautiful South, but no-one really loved them.

And they are an easy band to like – even my mum had a couple of their albums. In fact I suspect it was her copy of ‘Quench’ that I listened to and eventually ripped to my iTunes.

But as much as they were quite easy on the ears, they always had a bit of an edge about them and the songs are often much darker lyrically than their radio-friendly melodies might suggest.

That said, they do fit rather more into the ‘like them’ rather than ‘love them’ category for me, so maybe the label of ‘everyone’s second favourite band’ is fair.

Quench was a pretty good album, but maybe not all that distinguishable from the rest of their output.

But it’s nice enough to listen to all the same.

My favourite track is Dumb, because it takes me back to the late nineties and sitting under a table (for reasons I’m not entirely able to recall) in a pub with my housemate, completely drunk and bellowing the chorus (no doubt tunelessly) as loud as we could. Happy, irresponsible, days.