Chris Difford's album The Last Temptation of Chris is the perfect Sunday morning record.
You wake up early, or maybe a little late, and probably a bit groggy from the night before. You slip into autopilot and start up the coffee, grab a bagel, snatch the paper.
You flip through the CD racks for the soundtrack to your A.M. Something engaging, but not too harsh. Something that's comfortable without being too familiar. Music that will tickle your ears, but never get caught in the wax.
That's The Last Temptation of Chris. An easygoing, affable album of light pop tunes ("light" in the effervescent sense, not the Celine Dion radio single sense), Temptation deserves a play on your best Sunday mornings.
Difford is best known as one half of the Squeeze songwriting team along with Glenn Tilbrook. It's easy to hear some familiar Squeeze lyrical rhythms in Difford's words for Temptation, although his themes have moved far beyond the youthful tales of romance won and lost in such songs as "Up the Junction" and "Is That Love?"
These are songs written from an older, if not wiser, perspective; "Reverso" tells the story of a reversed vasectomy and the joy to be found in the resulting child. "Broken Family" floats reminiscences of divorce's impact on a family over a wheeling, infectious guitar riff.
"Battersea Boys" is a particular triumph; adapted from a tale told to Difford at an old folks' home, it's a sentimental reminiscence of two brothers and their simple journeys through life. Deceptively basic on the surface, but infused with stirring nostalgia and the kind of lilting melody that's tailor-made for drunken crooning when out getting teary-eyed with the old gang.
Overall, this is a very sentimental, nostalgic record, longing for such images of the past as a mother's handbag, kids playing outside the pub on a Sunday, and a pair of aging queens gossiping their way through the days. There's even a final song aptly titled "The Party's Over."
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