Inverse snobbery is alive and well in Britain. If the NME is anything to go by. For the title formerly known as the New Musical Express urged their readership to boycott Mr Hudson & The Library. Their crime? Lead singer Ben (Hudson) is a nice, middle-class boy who graduated from Oxford with a degree in English Literature.

If you talked to the erudite young man himself, a former library assistant no less, he’d no doubt claim the band to be an English R&B one. Which they are. As well as being purveyors of lounge electronica and, with the addition of Joy Joseph on steel pan and vocals, reggae-lite.
Yet Mr Hudson & The Library, who have just completed, as you do, a tour of UK libraries, are way cooler than the likes of Lily Allen. Even if the annoying bint were to catch hypothermia. Displaying a way with words, bookish Ben delights, for example, on ‘Too Late, Too Late’ where he muses “I need a line, this time the chat-up kind”.

A Tale Of Two Cities, named after the Charles Dickens novel of the same name, also describes Hudson’s own life story in that he grew up in Birmingham but now lives in London. The two metropolises’ music scenes are an obvious influence: everything from Bowie to Madness to even Bitty bloody Maclean. As are other British locales, with ‘Brave The Cold’ sounding like a halfway house between ABC and Prefab Sprout.

Fans attest to the album being a perfect companion for long journeys. You’d do well to heed their advice. Rather than that of the NME who you should, of course, boycott.
(4¼/5)