"Of all the incompetent useless bastards working in the field of music Daniel Baker, aka Ship Canal, would have to be the most incompetent and useless. If you can imagine the least professional musician in the world - perhaps one of the aka pygmies - then magically make them ten times less professional - then, reader, you have Daniel Baker.
Famously, legendarily, working on a stolen and broken twenty-year old laptop with cracked software; Ship Canal make the most resolutely uncommercial music it is possible to. This has been proved by experts. Great sludgy slabs of soft-synth dirge layered with what sounds like deliberately badly-recorded drunken wails and yelps slathered over with cheap reverb like a Bisto gravy. The LP's youtube video, the featured visuals for "The Housing Estate Sings", is a full-length documentary about the history of Manchester's docks - possibly the most unremittingly depressing video I have ever seen. I've now watched it three times.
You can only imagine the chaos and traffic jams that would beset Central London if by freak accident even one of these tracks were played on Capital Radio in the morning. People would be ashen-face, weeping, prostrate over their Toyotas.
And yet, and yet, lurking in the cracked non-grooves like those on my favouritely monikered "Rich Folk Came and Took My Cheap Alcohol" there is a singular humanity which is at once uplifting, self-deprecating and funny and an acutely sensitive musical intelligence to boot. There is a beauty here which has no name."
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