Paolo Nutini: Sunny Side Up

Scottish crooner, Paolo Nutini is a little known gem. His debut album probably made it to far fewer ears than it should have, because he had a cheesy, poppy break-out single. But if you’d listened further onto the record, you would likely have loved the music that Nutini made there. So a long-overdue follow-up album from the young singer was welcomed with open arms. His new album, “Sunny Side Up”, makes his debut, “These Streets” look tame and slightly boring in comparison. Not that his first album wasn’t great to listen to throughout, but it was fairly intense and emotional and Nutini seems to have much more fun on this, his second album, as he gets more musically experimental and his sound becomes happier.

The touring that Nutini did on the back of his first album is evident, because a lot of the songs here experiment with sounds from around the world, like folk, reggae and ragged rock. Indeed, the first track, “Ten-ten” has an old ragtime vibe to it as trumpets open the record for listeners. It’s a fun track and looks sure to have fans up and dancing around to it.

Somehow, Nutini manages to make his rough and occasionally warbling voice work for his music amazingly well. It’s doubtful that the soulful ballad, “Coming Up Easy”, would work for anyone else, except him, in fact. The same is true of “Growing Up Beside You” and “High Hopes”.

“Tricks Of The Trade” is one of the few, slow and stripped-down songs on the album, but akin to Nutini’s breakout hit, “Last Request”, the song is attractive because of its honesty and no-frills sound.

The album picks right up after this with the vibey “Pencil Full Of Lead”, which sums up the bouyant energy of the album, where you can really hear Nutini having fun and revelling in his music. He then goes on to channel Bob Dylan’s vibe on “Chamber Music”, and evoke a rambling country sound on “Simple Things”.

Because of the eclectic collection of several genres on this album, you are either likely to be confused by it and put off by Nutini’s old-beyond-his-years ragged voice, or, if you get past that, you’ll get as much joy out of listening to this CD as Nutini did making it. And you’ll be repeating it endlessly for the rest of the year. It’s a unique and highly enjoyable collection of songs and your likely to find it hard to turn off at all! (If you manage, let me know how!)