Artist – Scott Beckett
Album – Dreamland
Released – 27th May 2024
Reviewer – Owen Gurrey, Liverpool Acoustic
Scott Beckett’s new album Dreamland offers unapologetic acoustic-driven songs that combine a boyish wistfulness with a more mature fall from innocence. In this, his lyrics often switch between the joyously optimistic and the heartsunk. The old English word ‘dream’ used to mean ‘joy, mirth’, even ‘music’. Quite when it gained its modern denotation of images, sensations and emotions experienced in sleep is for the etymologists. Still, it seems apt that there’s an imaginative fissure between the real and the imagined in Beckett’s lyrics.
Dreamland is a hopeful record. Beckett offers reassurance in the opening track that Days Will Get Better, or asks for patience, as in the single Wait For Me To Come Around. Across the album there’s a feeling he’s been on some coming-of-age journey and is ready to take his place, or that a long-lost lover has returned to him from some far-off region and “made it through the desert sands”, as in the excellent Take Me Home.
Throughout there’s a redemptive grace that feels uplifting. There are other examples of this coming-to, not least in the stomping electric third track Black to Crystal Blue where he sings “just know that in the end it’ll be alright”. It could be exit music for a boy-meets-girl feel-good film (set in Liverpool of course).
Whilst there’s moments of real joy, there are some songs which face up to emotional anguish. These songs feel masculine, grown-up. There’s nothing of the emotionally unstable, lovesick indie boy here. Beckett is on confident ground, even with lyrics that pull you up short as in Ghost Of You which opens “I went to the woods, tried to end it all for myself”. Opening to these moments of despair is brave. Perhaps we underplay the emotional guardrail that music can be when so much pop is honeyed and breezy.
The lyrics here are not mawkish, you can hear they come from honest experiences as he sings “I can’t believe how hard it’s been”. That sentiment continues in the picked refrain of Broken where he’s “done with feeling sad”.
The sun seems to rise slowly through the record, and that slow climb to dawn comes poignantly in the closing track where he sings poetically that “the lights of the city were built on the love from all of the streets in the dark” (Streets In The Dark’). Beckett is in control here. There’s nothing blokey to these feelings, they’ve come from a long exposure to the pitfalls of relationships, growing up, and coming to terms with himself.
His years as a solo musician, gigging several times a week across the city of Liverpool and beyond have borne fruit. His voice is clear (I’m reminded a bit of Embrace’s Danny McNamara), and you can hear every lyric; he knows what he’s doing with a guitar and a mic.
With Dreamland we have songs to “get you through the night” on a long drive (The Best I Can for You). I imagine Beckett has done his fair share of these drives after gigs. They’re songs that carry you over, perhaps born from the long ache of wanting to get home to someone you love.
Owen Gurrey
Review © 2024 Owen Gurrey, Liverpool Acoustic
Dreamland was released on 27th May and is available to buy on CD at Bandcamp and stream on Spotify using the links below.