The LUMP LP ends with a monotone set of spoken credits. It starts "LUMP is a product". A collaboration between Laura Marling and Mike Lindsay, of whom I have seen Laura Marling live and like a lot of her stuff and I had not heard of Lindsay before this album.
The first I heard of LUMP was the intriguing video for the extraordinary single Curse of the Contemporary I then had the chance to attend the album launch at Rough Trade East which was an interesting moment, hearing a new set of songs for the first time with little context as to what the nature of the collaboration or the project was.
Marling does the singing and the lyrics but intriguingly mostly played bass live. Lindsay bounced around stage playing guitar and handling the samples and treated sound. Compared to Marling's solo performances this was a much livelier and engaging performance.
Apart from the appeal of people on stage who were clearly having fun, the thing that remained with me was mostly Marling's distinctive phrases in the song lyrics. There are lots of little lyrical hooks, one of my favourites is "To be born a crab, lonely and sad".
The poetic imagery is contained within relatively straight-forward structures that tend to repeat the entire song so you can catch onto the words the second time round.
I was disappointed to miss their other shows at the Garage and Oslo Hackney.
The album is enjoyable but not compulsive, its a small collection of well-crafted songs but I find myself having to be in the mood rather than putting it on and it putting me in a frame of mind. Its still one of the gems of 2018 though.