The Manchester legendary singer and composer, bass player of Magazine, The Bad Seeds and other bands, returns with a stylish, swaggering, 60s-influenced 10th studio solo LP, including timeless Motown, seductive blues, and vividly noir cinematic hues. After last year’s soundtrack for the documentary about the cult London cinema, Scala!!! Adamson also turns back the clock and opens the album with bang - with the fabulously Motown panache of a previous Song of the Day here, The Last Words of Sam Cooke, a depiction of the final tragic day of the great soul singer. It’s a first-person perspective set on that fateful day at the Haçienda Motel in South Central Los Angeles, 11 December 1964, when the singer picks up Elisa Boyer and ends up getting both barrels of motel manager Bertha Franklin’s shotgun. With punchy soulful sounds, organ, horns, and gospel backing, the song was co-written with lyricist Siena Barnes, the chorus recreates Cooke’s reported last words: “Lady, you shot me!” With the first volume of his memoirs (2021) also in the recent rearview mirror, this is an LP that slips effortlessly across various eras in parallel to Adamson’s film soundtrack career. The title track shimmers with tremolo guitars and that arresting spoken delivery about being transfixed by the girl in a video, and also has a touch of Serge Gainsbourg. Demon Lover swings along with rock’n’roll flavour of some early 60s B-movie. One Last Midnight echoes Blonde On Blonde-era Dylan (Like a Rolling Stone …). Amen White Jesus is a bluesy growl down a dusty road with a dash of Tom Waits. There’s rich wordplay and sophisticated genre-fusion throughout the album. Was It A Dream? ends with a sudden gasp as if to ask: was this a life in fantasy or reality? Following it, the last track, Waiting For The End of Time, is the most cinematic of all, like the soundtrack to a Bond movie or noir spy thriller, summoning perhaps more of the 1980s, raincoats and shadows then slowly fading out into black. From start to finish, vivd slices of stylishly entertainment, interccut realities and seductive scenes, all in all, one of his very best. Out on Barry Adamson Incorporated.
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