"A chaotic jazz-funk shuffle ... brass-backed, Sixties-style soul ... breezy country-and-western ... swampy Southern States blues--[Adamson's] new songs shone brightest." -- The Times "All over the place, swinging through dark pop, atmospheric instrumentals, and demented circus music ... unique with great personality." -- Pitchfork
Back to the Cat is the work of one of the most original, inventive, distinctive voices in British contemporary music at the height of his considerable powers. With a full consignment of brass and strings and a wealth of musicology behind him, Barry Adamson is about to take you on an epic adventure in sound.
Adamson's eighth album is where it all comes together: a life's passions poured into ten tracks that at once sound strangely familiar and dazzlingly new. A musical odyssey through noir jazz, sun-drenched pop ballads, fractious urban funk, devilish gospel, heavenly blues, and subversive soul ... not to mention a Hammond organ salute to the late, great Jimmy Smith.
As befits the man who invented the idea of the imaginary soundtrack album with his 1988 solo debut Moss Side Story, every song is rendered in vivid widescreen, with a narrative as compulsive as an Alfred Hitchcock chiller. With a wicked sense of humor and a beady eye for detail, Adamson charts the complexity and duplicity of human nature, often deliberately contrasting stories with sounds.
From a late-sixties Bacharach swinger and a mournful steel guitar breathing a country sigh to a heady gospel lament from an incarcerated Prince of Darkness, Back to the Cat takes you places you never expected.
