Hothouse Flowers
Your Love Goes
(01/03/04 Rubyworks)

A best of album can be seen by critics as an admission that your best days are behind you and that you’re a milking what you have done in the past, like a nostalgic farmer. However, after a four year gap since the aforementioned endeavour, the Hothouse Flowers have risen through the mud of inactivity to produce a burst of soulful positivity in their new single ‘Your Love Goes On’ taken from their forthcoming album ‘Into Your Heart’. This single is helped along by the appointment of the Dublin Gospel Choir to accentuate the feel good factor by complementing the heartfelt vocals, accompanied by tingling instrumentals.

Things get a little more sombre and slower in the B-side ‘Learning’, in which the mainstay of the group and vocalist Fiachna O’Braonian, produces a vocal sound resembling Michael Crawford singing a number from ‘The Phantom Of The Opera’, with a sharp piano accompaniment thrown in for good effect. The acoustic led ‘The Making Of Us All’ is the last track that most people will listen to on the single and certainly has a timeless quality. This may tempt the listener to break into their piggy bank a week after this single’s release, in order to invest the album and capture the springtime feeling that you inevitably will go with it.

www.hothouseflowers.com

David Adair