THREE minutes into Karl Hyde's first solo outing, eyeball-deep in the pilled-up-priest-on-a-6am-epiphany routine that has served him splendidly over the years, it seems fair to wonder if this is just an Underworld record with Rick Smith on sick leave.
But this illusion is abruptly shattered on the second track, Your Perfume Was the Best Thing, which is like a sort of schmaltzy Billy Bragg with electronic bits.
This is no better than it sounds, unfortunately, and there are several similar excursions still to come. One of them, Angel Café, endears in a Robert Wyatt kind of way, but the whole direction feels a bit like putting Bruce Forsyth in charge of Question Time, or something.
Having got this stuff out of his system, though, Hyde finds a much surer touch on the second half of the record. The default setting is super slow and spacious, steering towards David Sylvian or Another Green World Eno.
Best is Shadow Boy, which unhurriedly works through its gears over eight minutes like some kind of ambient rock supertanker. If we could just have a whole album of that next time around, all would be well.
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