RUSTIN MAN

Former Talk Talk man finally follows up Beth Gibbons collab… 17 years later.

When ex-Talk Talk bassist Paul Webb hooked up with Portishead singer Beth Gibbons in 2002, the resulting Rustin Man album was a striking set of haunting, fractured, bucolic folk. Having someone of Gibbons’ profile on board didn’t do them any harm, of course. Webb claims to have been working on the follow-up ever since, in a remote Essex farmhouse. But with no Gibbons on board this time round, the 57-year-old has taken the mic himself for a mid-life vocal debut. The result is a notably scruffier, occasionally Tom Waits-y, collection of beautifully despondent laments. His singing style is redolent of Mark Hollis’ world-weary tenor, tinged with Robert Wyatt’s fragile emotive warble, but that only adds to the blissfully melodic sense of resignation and ghostly, elegiac feel. At times the three-legged rhythms on Our Tomorrows have a fair bit in common with Talk Talk’s post-rock-pioneering later albums, but also sound ready to collapse, intoxicated, in a heap, as distant organ recalls Caravan after a big night. ‘I’ll just stay here getting stoned/ I’ve hardly got somewhere to go,’ he sings on the funereally paced The

World’s In Town. He can knock himself out round our gaff any time.