Released: 2005
One of the music industry’s truths is that nice guys nearly always lose. You may heart your favourite artist, but they’re almost certainly a diva, a dickhead, a tax dodger or hiding some awful secret which if you knew you’d probably have to seriously forgive them for. That’s the way it is.
Paul Smith was a nice guy, a goldfish in a tank of sharks. Writing in The Guardian at the point Smith and his band Maximo Park broke through the wall of boys-with-guitars into our consciousness, the avuncular Dave Simpson described him not unkindly as “a cross between Oscar Wilde, Basil Fawlty and a regional bank clerk undergoing a crisis.”
Nice guys tend to get shunted to the side in A&R scrums and are also sometimes unfortunate in love – and this was partially what the band’s debut album A Certain Trigger was about. By this point they’d dropped their more Avant Garde pretensions and were producing a brand of indie rock which in a crowded market was a clear level above their contemporaries. Apply Some Pressure, with it’s stop-start time signatures and bittersweet core, helped the record gain a Mercury Prize nomination when that mattered and proved that musically at least luck had very little to do with it.
The Voice Of Unreason 