Fame is a fickle beast, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t easy to plot out an imaginary career trajectory for U.K. singer/songwriter Jack Peñate in the coming year. Dig, if you will, the picture: his debut album, Matinée, is released in the U.S. this month. Sometime in February, there’ll be a video for what would be the record’s first single, “Learning Lines.” The video for the song, which is a plain acoustic mid-tempo jaunt in the key of kindred spirit Jason Mraz, will comprise the following treatment: black-and-white footage of Peñate in a relatively downscale recording studio with a backing band of people too attractive to be session musicians. Clips of Peñate and the band ‘rocking out’ (an impossible task, given the track’s dull and utterly average sound) are interspersed with the ‘dudes’ having a laugh and maybe a pint as well, sitting on boxes in the studio. All this as Peñate sings inane, ’90s-style lyrics about going through the motions and, well, learning lines (especially ironic when one considers the staid predictability of Peñate’s oeuvre).
So the video gets play on MTV2 or whatever the kids watch these days, and some Top-40 radio programmer decides to give it a spin or two in what he or she deems to be the ‘appropriate’ markets for the track. By March, “Learning Lines” is a modest hit with the same demographic that bankrolls Damien Rice’s recording career, and Peñate’s label decides to roll out the second single, “Spit At Stars.” With its rockabilly guitar figures and Jack’s frantic, melodic delivery, the impossible-to-dislike track expands Peñate’s demographic to include 17-year-olds who recently discovered XTC and takes Matinée to the nationwide record charts around mid-April (I’m thinking it hits #21). The record steadily sells into May, and by June, well, wouldn’t you know: Peñate is opening for an act that might share his college-friendly yet unoriginal and inoffensive demographic (let’s call this act Dave Matthews Band).
As people get to truly know Peñate’s body of work through Matinée, his would-be listenership will be divided into two groups. The first group will be those same teenagers who shell out money to see Peñate and “Dave” in July, stealthily packing bowls in the arena parking lot and hoping the security guards don’t catch them getting high. They’ll lay in the back of flatbed pickup trucks in August, alternately cuddling and copulating to bland ballads like “My Yvonne” and “We Will Be Here” and secretly wondering if nonsensically gushy lines like "The stars can’t feel the lovers’ touch/ The kiss that makes your body blush" were written just for them.
The second group will be people who see through the dull and unoriginal singer-songwriter nature of Peñate’s style after giving Matinée a couple of focused listens. That doesn’t mean they’ll categorically dismiss the record, however; besides the previously mentioned “Spit At Stars,” they’ll probably still be spinning tracks in September such as the moderately pleasant “Run For Your Life,” where a stuttering bridge with ghostly "ah"s nicely fills out the propulsive backbeat melody (and offsets such uncomfortably awkward lyrics as “Silence equals peace” and “Oh what a love to hurt one”).
By the end of the year, Peñate will head back to the U.K. to suffer the same fate his MySpace'd contemporaries, Kate Nash and Lily Allen, are inevitably staring down at; he’ll maintain a steady popularity in his home country but eventually become as memorable in the U.S. as Robbie Williams or Kula Shaker. Don’t blame the picky U.S. record-buying (downloading?) public, though; the onus resides on Peñate’s shoulders for issuing a bland, typical debut that manages to simultaneously sound like everybody else on the radio and nobody in particular.
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