The Voluntary Butler Scheme: "Heart Too Bored To Beat"

Like some holidaying student trying to scrabble together a travel fund, Rob Jones is…the Voluntary Butler Scheme: give him a call and he’ll bull your boots, make everything symmetrical above knee level. He’ll also spill the beans on his bone-dry love life, most of which he’s condensed into his debut four-track Trading Things In where you can hear the freshman angst between every brushed drum, the dead kebab air behind a rush of fluffed couplets.

Reactionary yet? Don’t be—you need a stomach stronger than a Sports Science graduate to help you cope with the Butler’s hard luck, and on “Heart Too Bored To Beat” his defeatist attitude skirts around quasi-catatonia, his murmur matching the one in his ventricles. “I’d do a lot of groveling / I’d shine a lot of shoes / Just to have you hear the news of my blues,” he confesses to an ex-girlfriend’s answering machine, his pride jettisoned between bin lid rattles and banjo twangs. It gets feebler: “I’d make myself teaboy when I used to be MD / Of my multinational company / Just to have you back…” Jones isn’t a moaner, not really, and his wallowing in the swamp of the rejected is made charming by his chest-infected dickless drawl, his lyrics passionate as first-time graffiti. Adjusting to the woes of singledom as it’s forced upon him one bitter beta blocker at a time, Jones plumbs the horrors of hungover voicemail with the bravery of a care home relief worker, mopping up piss with his bare hands. “I’ve tried sending flowers, letters, poetry and prose / But I don’t really know anything about any of those / Things.” I mean, it won’t exactly get your blood pumping, but it will tap toes and get you your empathy fix before you go off looking for something truly hangdog. A gibbeted German Shepherd or something.