Album cover for The Bravest Man in the Universe. Photo / Supplied
If you were taking bets you might say this could be Bobby Womack's last album. In the past year he's had surgery for prostate cancer, then a growth on his colon, and was hospitalised again with pneumonia.
He's in his late 60s and can reflect on a life born into
poverty, three decades of cocaine addiction, being shot at by his wife when she discovered his affair with a step-daughter ... Not to mention his sublime soul-soaked music and work with Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin and mostly recently Damon Albarn's Gorillaz.
Albarn has co-produced this very different album for Womack where his tattered voice and aching songs are placed in techno-minimal settings full of stuttering electrostatic beats, simple melodic phrases repeated, lonely piano and surface noise.
Yet this doesn't distract from Womack's tough, cracked and pain-filled singing - in fact it throws it into even starker contrast with every choked note and overdub.
In a snatch of spoken word Womack says as a man grows older his perception goes deeper because he understands at last what he is trying to say.
