One nice thing about being in your late 40s—there actually are a few—is that you’ve been alive long enough to fall in love with an album, drift in your tastes and sell your copy of it, forget that the band who made it ever existed, and then get surprised 25 years later by a reissue.
My music collection no longer includes much that’d sound remotely appropriate on a mixtape for a crush, but Brough’s “Down in Splendour” feels engineered for the purpose. It’s also the only song on Melt that I recognized instantly, after not hearing it since Bill Clinton’s presidency. The whole record has a gorgeous sweet-and-sour vibe—lush and abrasive, peppy and mournful, thrilling and sinister.
