Nev Cottee
Album: Strange News From The Sun
Label: Wonderful Sound
Tracks: 9
Website: http://www.nevcottee.com

To the delight of anyone who stumbled over Cottee's 2013 debut Stations, with his deep dark truthful voice, the singer continues to paint from a rich sonic palette that's decorated by gentle pedal steel guitar, sweet acoustic strums and restrained electronica. Oddly, for a Manchester indie kid (he used to front Noel Gallagher buddies Proud Mary) his voice brings to mind Bobby Charles, even Johnny Cash, and there's a stack of suffering implied in the voice, but kindness also. The vocals are tempered but not defined by experience, an innate gentleness taking the edge off the sadness and weariness that lurk beneath the surface.

When I Was Young casts a plaintive long view backwards as the singer remembers in a kind of misty-eyed trance and the early stand out Annie is a lovely, longing paean to someone who's not around anymore, its perfectly crafted musical setting completed by the late intrusion of a female choir. If I Could Tell You offers a woozy, lolloping view of a lover's story that's slacker than trip hop but from a similar part of the aural universe. There are elements of Charles Stepney's majestic orchestrations and some delicious Jimmy Webb piano motifs that play around the edge of sunkissed guitars and lush harmonies.

The kind of thing Jason Pierce once did so well, Contact is an instrumental comma that allows the ears to adjust to the gorgeous sounds that have coated their canals over the preceding three tracks before giving way to the folksy, otherworldly Scarlet Rose Light with its beautifully delivered astral excursion in the outro. The sweetness returns in country-tinged All Eyes On You, a holding moment before the ringing pedal steel that heralds the glorious pop-swing road trip anthem Follow the Sun that, in a sane world, would soundtrack this summer's festival treks.

Just like Contact before it, Coda offers a reflective music interlude to cleanse the senses before the mighty closing symphonic folk of Always In Dreams with its nifty 60s pop guitar figures, nursery rhyme melodies about "signposts and smells", breathy harmonic sighs and suspended choral passages. The monumental finale is thoroughly psychedelic in its ambition and leaves the listener at the water's edge eager to set sail again. This is lofty stuff, welcome sonic succour for mind, body and soul.

Nick Churchill
www.thegranvillechambers.co.uk