Robb Johnson & The Irregulars
Album: Once Upon A Time
Label: Irregular
Tracks: 9
Website: www.robbjohnson.co.uk

Every bit as passionate and committed as you'd expect, Robb Johnson's first full electric band recording since 2008 will doubtless elicit the usual shrug from the wider world. But it's their loss for whether backed by whistle and flute or bass, drums and guitar, Johnson remains one of our most accomplished and literate songwriters.

He observes the state of the nation (ours and others) with a wry eye and acerbic tone. Second Division Life unpicks the shabbiness of so-called Broken Britain, but rather than merely bemoan the patrician revenge that Cameron presides over, Johnson finds a note of the everyman's warmth in lines like "By the skin of our second division fingernails we carry on laughing/Tell me about it, second division life".

The record is actually a chronicle of Johnson's thoughts on the state of the (European) Union, most notably on Magdeburg These Days, with its bleak appraisal of the city that grew out of the rubble of WW2, and Euroville, which paints a rosier, more utopian view of pan-continental commonality.

But if you need one single reason to investigate this album, it's this: Feast of Fools, the songs that conjures with the notion of a band that has Robert Johnson on guitar, Van Gogh on bass, Yoko Ono on ukulele and Norman Wisdom on drums, while Da Vinci does the cooking. That'll do it for me.

Nick Churchill
www.thegranvillechambers.co.uk