Joe Blossom

All Of The Above (Cabbage Tree Records)

The best thing to come out of Palmerston North since The Skeptics, Joe Blossom is the nom de disque of one Sean O’Brien, formerly of The Livids and a man whose 2011 debut solo album,

Nocturnes, held such a strange, magical power, it cured me of a seemingly terminal flu and made me raise up from my death bed and dance like a scarecrow battered by a very fresh northerly.

All Of The Above delivers a potent hit of unusually ambitious pop music at a time when this is precisely what the doctor ordered.

What should we call such thoughtful, elegant, calmly groovy balladry? Library hop? Mensa pop? Certainly, it’s brainy and literate in equal measure, with O’Brien pondering love, loneliness, beauty, homesickness and more with a keenly poetic turn of phrase and no shortage of well-baited hooks.

O’Brien’s voice recalls Bryan Ferry’s airy croon, stripped of vibrato. The title track and The Only

Voices, in particular, evoke lateperiod Roxy Music retooled with meatier basslines and better beats, ensuring the songs never descend into oily ‘‘stockbroker soul’’ .

William Blake and Dylan Thomas duke it out in opening track, Tyger

Tyger, over twinkling piano and a percolating synth line from fellow Manawatu boy, Grayson Gilmour, while Sensitive Boy sports the weirdest truncated lead breaks in living memory.