Prefab leak

Exhibiting symptoms of Internet-distraction-itis, this week I went from watching the Stars video “Hold on When You Get Love and Let Go When You Give it” to co-lead singer Torquil Campbell’s voluminous Twitter feed. When I read Campbell's tweet, “All thats left online of the prefab album which recently surfaced and vanished. I've heard it though....,” I went on a frenzied mission to see if I could dig up the alleged album, employing nefarious means if I had to.

I found it. It’s been dubbed The Devil Came A-Callin’ which is also the name of one of the tracks. For Prefab Sprout fans, it’s manna from heaven. Devotees ascribe band leader Paddy McAloon with legendary song-writing powers, though his output has been minuscule since the early 1990s. So the fact that the leaked album is also very good—and very satisfying for fans—is enough to make me delirious.

It’s hard to tell when the 10 songs were written and recorded. The band's last release, Let’s Change the World with Music, came out in 2009 but was comprised of demos recorded in 1993. That album had a grand self-important sound that came across as bit stilted and surprisingly sentimental for a band that built its reputation on being anti-romantic (One of their best known songs, “Cars and Girls” from 1988, was an attack on Bruce Springsteen’s supposedly limited view of matters of the heart). It didn't have much humour.

This new mystery album channels the looser, raw quirkiness of the early albums, though the song craft is some of Paddy McAloon’s best. There are no breathy vocals from Wendy Smith, so we have to assume that the material is, at the very least, more recent than 2000, when Smith reportedly left the band.

Is it real? Of course it is. There’s the exuberant glee of “The Best Jewel Thief in the World,” the soulful “Mysterious” and the heartbreaking “Grief Built the Taj Mahal,” where McAloon chases Gershwin as doggedly as he ever has.

No word on if and when the album will be released—no word acknowledging the thing at all—but some of us will certainly will be raking the sky, “listening for smudged echoes of the moment of creation” until it appears.