More You Becomes You

The debut Plush single, “Found A Little Baby”, was such a perfect orchestral pop single that it was hard to imagine how Liam Hayes, the mastermind behind the ‘group’, would top it. So, he didn’t. But that’s not to undersell the first Plush album, More You Becomes You, which Hayes approached as a document, however carefully sculpted, of a performance – one man at a piano, singing his songs as dusk creeps into darkness. The songs are melancholy, but not without a certain humour, and meticulously written, though not without surprising turns: the moment where Hayes’s voice breaks in “(I Didn’t Know) I Was Asleep” is a perfect Brechtian device. Far more than a curiosity, though, More You Becomes You is both deeply personal, yet strangely abstract; moving, yet detached. Hayes would never do anything quite like it again.