Album Review: The House of Love - A State of Grace (2022)

Craig Stephen waited such a long time for the latest House of Love album to arrive he started to fear it never would …

It had been a long time since House of Love released She Paints Words in Red (2013), but in that intervening period gig-goers were teased with some new material that they rightly expected to form a new studio album. It would have been the third LP featuring Terry Bickers since he returned in the early 2000s following his acrimonious departure in 1989. But in 2021 Bickers was off again. This time there wasn’t the friction or enmity of the initial split, with a band statement blaming the pandemic for Guy Chadwick’s decision as he prepared for rescheduled dates in the United States. In a later interview the frontman suggested Bickers declined his invitation as he was loyal to Matt Jury and Pete Evans who had been sacked from the band because Chadwick didn’t want to work with them anymore. It seemed that the new album was in jeopardy.

 But, then, Chadwick announced a new line-up with ex-Idlewild man Keith Osborne on lead guitar, Harry Osborne on bass, and Hugo Degenhardt on drums. Degenhardt had previously worked with, ahem, Rod Stewart and Robbie Williams. These guns for hire would appear with Chadwick on the UK tour of autumn 2022 and the US tour soon after.

The album with the new line-up is a radical departure from the comeback album Days Run Away (2005) and its morose follow-up She Paints Words in Red. I’m actually being quite diplomatic about the latter, it was a stinker, very pastoral, placid and far removed from previous House of Love albums. Chadwick was keen to return to the sound of the band in its earlier days.

State of Grace was recorded in Hastings on England’s south coast and among the guest musicians are John Pilka, who was in Chadwick’s first significant band, Kingdoms, in the mid-80s. The cover is somewhat grainy and industrial and it looks suspiciously like a goth album with its font and monochrome style.

If Chadwick’s intention was to return to the band’s past sound he has largely achieved that, especially on the guitar-driven single ‘Clouds’ which is a call to someone to “Get your head outta the clouds”, a refrain that is repeated ad nauseum for the final minute and 40 seconds in majestical rock’n’roll style. The accompanying video features a greying Chadwick walking around a seaside town including along a pier and through a games arcade. There’s little in the way of politics or diatribes on the way of the modern world on the dozen tracks – that’s just not Chadwick’s style – and love and how it spins a web around our hearts and minds are instead front of house.

Any suggestion this might be a solo album is augmented by the resurrection of a song from Chadwick’s brief turn as a solo artist in the late 1990s. ‘Laughter and Honey’ was a beautiful, mainly acoustic B-side; as the renamed ‘Into the Laughter’ it is a full minute shorter but has electric guitars and a full band. That clearly is the intention: to turn a very much one-man effort into a team endeavour. And it certainly benefits from four pairs of hands working in unison with Keith Osborne’s guitar playing very much to the fore. Another highlight is the album opener ‘Sweet Loser’ which begins with harmonica playing which is superseded by a drone riff that builds into something quite stunning.

‘Melody Rose’ is quite grungy. If there is a past reference in this song, it is to the critically panned Audience With the Mind (1993), an album that probably should have been re-recorded or released as an EP. Nevertheless, like that particular work, I have come to love this in its own way. The bassline parties with the drums in a manner I never thought possible.

It is certainly a ubiquitous album, and there’s a couple of numbers in ‘Queen of Song’ and ‘In My Mind’ that suggest Chadwick has been listening to authentic Americana music. The former has touches of blues; the latter a tinge of country music. Curiously, Chadwick’s languid vocals on ‘In My Mind’ remind me of Nigel Blackwell of Half Man Half Biscuit. Without the deadpan humour.

State of Grace is a varied album that takes the listener on a trip across the Atlantic. Yes, it certainly sounds like peak House of Love from 1987 to 1993 but there’s traces of more recent work at times. It has the sound of four people gelling fairly quickly, but also of one man in charge and make no mistake this is a Guy Chadwick-fuelled project. How this record would have eventuated if Terry Bickers and his two mates were on board is impossible to determine. I suspect it would have been different in good and bad ways. But we have an album I think the House of Love can be proud of.