Verdict: Best, and strangest, work yet from funk soul brother.
Now this is more like it from fitful British soul singer, beat boxer, and rogue music-maker Jamie Lidell. On his last album, JIM, from 2008, you could be forgiven for thinking his name was Jamie Cullum, since it was so lightweight and flighty.
However, Compass-his fourth album-is inventive, knee-quaking, and downright whacky. It brings together dance, soul, electronica, folk, funk, gospel and even traces of thrash, with Lidell unifying it by way of his gutsy and sweet whiteboy voice, an obsessive passion for genre-mashing. There's also a lovely brittle distorted rawness throughout.
Much of the album was inspired by jams Lidell had at Beck's Record Club, an ongoing project by singer/songwriter Beck Hansen, who gets together musicians to cover an album by a certain artist in one day. At this particular session Beck, Lidell, Wilco and Feist, among others, reworked 60s psychedelic folk rocker Skip Spence's 1969 album, Oar.
The experience obviously inspired Lidell's experimental and mischevious music-making ways to new heights.
Compass features two diverse tracks with Beck (Come On Chameleon is a raucous, distorted stomp and Big Drift an eerie and exotic blues mantra); on I Wanna Be Your Telephone he channel's lo-fi P-funk and Sign O' The Times-era Prince with devastating effect; and then he's off into the catchy and playful flute-inflected Enough's Enough and the thigh-slapping percussive gospel of The Ring.
And in between, there's everything from punishing chaotic beats on You Are Waking, to the acoustic folk and orchestral mariachi touches of the title track. It's this seamless variety that makes Compass the album Lidell has been wanting to make for more than a decade.
