I’m New Here – One True Pairing

Tom Fleming looks visibly uncomfortable. Wincing slightly and itching his beard, he looks away from our video call before admitting with a rueful grin: “I’m still feeling a bit guilty about being a singer-songwriter. Do you know what I mean? It’s not something I feel is necessarily a viable art form.” As a magazine that features no shortage of such performers, we’re bound to ask: why ever not? “Well, it’s just the cliche of it. I am, you know, one guy with an acoustic guitar a lot of the time… I don’t want to be seen as another moaning white boy.”

THE REVIEW OF 2024, NICK CAVE, ALICE COLTRANE, ELVIS COSTELLO, KRIS KRISTOFFERSON, CASSANDRA JENKINS AND MORE STAR IN THE NEW UNCUT – ORDER A COPY HERE!

Male and caucasian Tom Fleming may be, but moaning would be a criminally simplistic way of describing the compelling sounds he makes on his second solo album under the name One True Pairing. Having risen to prominence as bassist and sometime singer of Cumbrian art-rock mavericks Wild Beasts, Fleming was perhaps always going to feel the urge to resist convention. After the band went their separate ways in 2018, he made a self-titled debut that blended sparse electronica with noisier guitar textures and unflinching examinations of modern working-class masculinity. “I thought it was Born In The USA,” he confides. “I thought, ‘People are going to get this, it’s going to fly.’ But listening back, it’s a very challenging listen. It sounds like someone coming from a difficult place.”

New album Endless Rain does too, but it’s more like Tom Fleming’s Nebraska – a stripped-down set of self-reflective, acoustic-led vignettes. However, it also grabs the attention thanks to subtle sonic touches such as the tiptoeing violin and increasingly panicked percussion that punctuate opener “As Fast As I Can Go” and the faint sense of time ticking away that infuses the angst-wracked strumming of “Mid-Life Crisis”.

The input of Fleming’s long-time arranger Josh Taylor-Moon and the guest fiddle of Lankum’s Cormac MacDiarmada play their part in colouring that soundscape, as does the atmospheric production of John ‘Spud’ Murphy, whom Fleming hails as “incredible”, crediting him for enhancing certain traditional folk touches such as the delicate fronds of finger-picking that decorate self-examinations such as “Human Frailty”. Fleming’s vocals are continually arresting as they channel the quiet desperation of John Martyn as he sings, with a nod to the scary realities of Covid, of “gagging and choking for the smallest breath”.

Such lines reflect a loose theme running through Endless Rain: trying to keep one’s head metaphorically above water. Its title was initially inspired by a particularly soggy period back home in Cumbria that our down-at-heart hero spent grappling with a break-up and financial penury as well as “depression, neurodivergence, addiction and its aftermath”. Elsewhere, though, there are also moments of righteous anger – albeit shot through with a certain black humour – at the ongoing plight of the working poor. “We will come in deadly silence… we will drag you meekly from your beds”, he vows on “A Landlord’s Death”. “There’s a scene in For Whom The Bell Tolls, when they lead out the capitalists into the village and throw them one-by-one off the cliff,” he explains with a mischievous smile. “I grew up in rented accommodation, I still live in rented accommodation, and this country is not in a good spot. It’s fun, cathartic for me to sing like this, because I so often talk in metaphor and I’m like, ‘No, I’m not going to do that this time!’” Spoken like a true singer-songwriter.

Endless River is available now on Domino

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.