JAN LINTON

Patchily inventive album wants for personality.

AWarrington-born allrounder musician who’s big in Japan and has over time collaborated with Bill Nelson, Richard Barbieri and Duran Duran’s John Taylor, Jan Linton’s a genre-shifting experimentalist with a lengthy catalogue. This is his first song-based album after 14 years in the ambient zone, and sprinkles gentle vocals and shrewdly dramatic effects over dubby, delayed rhythms to create a mood midway between pleasant and portentous. Abrahams (Eno, David Holmes) interjects clean, evocative guitar lines. The feel is very Japan (the band)-influenced, or more precisely Rain Tree Crow, to whom

the debt is undeniable. Vocally, however, Linton is no David Sylvian, and the record suffers from lacking a voice strong enough to command the tastefully-lit stage the music builds. There’s a loping, languid groove to the title track and the spacious Joy, while a moment like Cocteau Sublime is as ethereal as its name. Art pop and electro make polite cameos, as does Tim Bowness on the bonus disc. Ultimately the line in Anemone – ‘she washes over me’ – feels pertinent, as the album never quite pulls off the lazy grandeur to which it aspires. It taxis on all the right runways but the flight never quite lifts off.