JOHN GREAVES

Henry Cow man’s remarkable exercise in scabrous restraint.

With 50 years of esoteric musical endeavour on his frankly bewildering CV, John Greaves’ status as one of art rock’s most respected figures is hardly in doubt at this point. The former Henry Cow and National Health man has managed to contribute to a vast array of bands and projects over the years, not to mention his own impressive catalogue of solo material and countless collaborations with everyone from Robert Wyatt and Peter Blegvad to Michael Nyman and Penguin Café Orchestra.

One heartening result of all that furious creativity is that Life Size arrives with a whispered promise that practically anything could happen here. In reality, this is an endearingly restrained affair but one infused with the same spirit of questing bravado that has informed so much of Greaves’ work. A collection of elegantly downbeat songs sung (and spoken) in English, French and Italian by the bassist and feminine cohorts Valérie Gabail, Annie Barbazza and Himiko Paganotti, Life Size covers a huge amount of musical ground, albeit always shrouded in the monochrome shadows of early hours melancholy.

The opening Air De La Lune is worth the price of admission on its own: four minutes of gently eerie vocal harmony, it’s a mesmerising entry point. Next, The Same Thing marries Greaves’ tremulous baritone to a shimmering, shuffling backdrop of xylophone and upright bass, with fluid changes of tempo and time and an irresistible undercurrent of melodrama. There are more traditional songs here, too: In Te is a simple, folksy strum with a faint whiff of baroque horror and a dash of tasteful piano: it’s not a million miles away from Nick Cave’s life-ravaged balladry, and all the better for it. Meanwhile, God Song crisply asks the man in the sky, ‘Is this some kind of joke you’re playing?’ before eviscerating said bearded deity across three minutes of sawing strings and undulating piano chords: the necessarily spiky work of an instinctive subversive, perhaps, but also one of the most unsettling things you will hear this year. Elsewhere, Kew Rhône Is Real is a skewed diatribe set to jittery, dancing skeleton rhythms that favour riveting tension over celebratory release, and Earthly Powers a wonderfully crusty campfire sing-along.

The album’s emotionally raw zenith is provided by a new version of How Beautiful You Are, a song Greaves co-wrote with Peter Blegvad and that first appeared on the Slapp Happy man’s 1983 solo album The Naked Shakespeare. Impossibly delicate, this stripped down, torchlit rendition may make you weep uncontrollably. But don’t let that put you off.

ENDEARINGLY RESTRAINED, INFUSED WITH QUESTING BRAVADO.