The Monochrome Set

★★★ Fabula Mendax TAPETE. CD/DL/LP Veteran louche-poppers’ song cycle based on the 15th century manuscripts. Forty-two years into a stop-start career, the fifteenth album from Ganesh ‘Bid’ Seshadri and mutable compadres (currently including almost-original bassist Andy Warren) draws on the possibly apocryphal accounts of Madame Armande de Pange, a disciple of Joan of Arc, no less. Fabula Mendax translates as ‘lying tale’, and Bid renders the album’s picaresque litany of devious noblemen, murderous knights and debauched bishops with typically knowing aplomb – fiddles, lutes and pipes augmenting the band’s mellifluous baroque guitar-pop to impart the requisite Hundred Years War atmos. Indeed, the singer is in fine, soaring form throughout, notably on chiming opener Rest, Unquiet Spirit, while My Little Reliquary finds him crooning roguishly against a paisley- hued psych-folk dirge. The briskly galloping Summer Of The Demon, meanwhile, seems to channel the Flashing Blade theme before exploding into a chorus of epic yet typically droll proportions. David Sheppard