PETE ASTOR

One For The Ghost 6/10

One-time Weather prophet looks back in languor

2016’s Spilt Milk was a lovely reckoning with dawn-of-Creation jangle that chimed nicely with a revived indie classicism. now lining up alongside Lloyd Cole and Robert Forster in Tapete’s velvet veterans home, Astor returns with more rueful elegies for absent friends, including, on the title track, oscar Wilde and Wittgenstein. One For The Ghost is at its best when he works up a head of steam and leaves James Hoare’s guitar space to sparkle, as on “Water Tower” (Jonathan Richman flips his wig for pastoral brutalism) and the defiant almost-prayer of “you Better Dream”.