Baio

★★★

Dead Hand Control GLASSNOTE. CD/DL/LP

Vampire Weekend bassist takes leave to make third solo album.

“I’ve been thinking about the End Times,” sings Chris Baio on the title track of his third solo album and while that’s hardly a USP at the moment, few people consider the future apocalypse with quite such springy enthusiasm. While Baio’s interest in nuclear missile systems (apparent on the ominous techno intrusions of Dead Hand) fits with his fondness for ’80s British synthpop, the follow-up to 2016’s

Man Of The World comes with the smart lightness of touch that’s the Vampire Weekend birthright. Unsurprisingly, that’s most obvious on the sparkling, sprawling OMW, a revisited collaboration with Ezra Koenig, but it’s also there in his playful vocal touches – a glam rock “ooh!”, a sinister Gallic whisper – or the wry Anglophile disco of Endless Me, Endlessly in which Baio makes increasingly insistent offers of friendship. On this evidence, there should be plenty of takers.