Jack James

Third Culture Kid

(self released)

TWO and a bit years on from the intriguing Letters of Last Resort comes another collection of downbeat Americana from Glasgow’s Jack James, on which he plays all the instruments bar drums (Gavin Crawford) and croons in a style that suggests so many influences but is hard to pin down to one. This time around I detected echoes of the Go-Betweens, which is no bad thing at all.

There have been at least another two albums taking the term for someone raised in an environment different from that of either parent as their title, and it is unclear – even from track The Root Cause, which deploys the phrase – why James has used it for his seventh album in eight years. But then opacity and clarity are strange bedfellows in his distinctive songwriting. “Tried to drown my sorrows, they learned how to swim,” he sings in Frida Kahlo, while Gift Horse’s Teeth boasts the memorable couplet: “And so you had a son/ Everyone else was having one."

The organ-decorated Love the Core and elegiac Sean Grady are more rock ’n’ roll than much of his laidback music-making, and bereavement and heartbreak have supplied some inspiration, but wry humour is often to the fore. Want a lyric for the climate of his hometown? “Travis comes in handy here,” he notes.

Keith Bruce