A self-styled ‘jazz devil’, Barry Adamson is as noir as you can get without actually being ‘The Big Sleep’. He called his brilliant 1999 LP ‘The Murky World Of Barry Adamson’, and live shows are so dark he sometimes needs an aide with a torch to help him reach his stool.
Premiered last November as part of his unlikely residency at the London Jazz Festival, the eighth solo album by the former Magazine and Bad Seeds bassist still sees saxophones coil like smoke, beats stalk down dark alleyways and strings stab menacingly through ambient wash. But there are also regular blasts of playful, bravura, sumptuously retro pop, framing some brilliant lyrics and excusing a voice that’s always theatrical but sometimes a tad thin.
‘I wanna spend a little time in your front garden,’ Adamson sings, as bold as Elvis, on the outrageously jaunty jazz-funk of ‘Spend A Little Time’. Of course, whether by this our mystery man means to get with his lady, bury a corpse or simply plant a few pansies is still anyone’s guess.
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