IAN McNABB: “Head Like A Rock” (This Way Up)

THIS ONE’S been nominated for a Mercury Music Award and it’s not difficult to see why. The follow-up to last year’s Truth and Beauty, Head Like A Rock finds the former Icicle Works frontman at the peak of his powers, firing on all cylinders and at one with his particularly generous muse.

In truth, it’s an album of two parts. On four of the ten songs, McNabb enlists the services of Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina from Neil Young’s long-time backing band Crazy Horse, with interesting results. The opening track, `Fire Inside My Soul’ begins with the feedbacked, distorted guitar tones which will be familiar to all Neil Young fans but McNabb’s passionate voice soars above the sonic storm, making the song very much his own. Likewise with `You Must Be Prepared To Dream’ and the slower-paced `Child Inside A Father’, both unrelenting in their fuzztone attack but tempered by McNabb’s pop sensibility – though the latter is a little close to Young’s `Cortez The Killer’ for comfort.

His emotional commitment to the material is always impressive, especially on the gospelly `Still Got The Fever’ which he sings like a man desperately re-asserting his youthful yearnings and `Go Into The Light’ a funky, soulful workout with big, brash backing vocals. McNabb’s impeccably enunciated vocal tones and lyrical mannerisms have been compared to that of Scott Walker and there is a resemblance on the more restrained songs like `As A Life Goes By’, a country-paced number with a vaguely Beatlesque melody and `This Time Is Forever’, a dreamy soft-rock tune with an engagingly catchy chorus.

McNabb obviously doesn’t have much truck with the three-minute radio-friendly ditty — most of the tracks on Head Like A Rock average at about eight-minutes each. But they don’t necessarily suffer for that — usually evolving from extended intros into broad verses and chorus with elongated instrumental breaks.

Oddly, one of the shorter songs on the album has the longest title: `Sad Strange Solitary Catholic Mystic’ is a vocal “instrumental” with wistful, dreamy harmonies that could be a Pet Sounds out-take. The final track `May You Always’ — again with help from the Crazy Horse crew – fittingly echoes Dylan’s `Forever Young’ in it’s optimistic gaze at the future: “May your vision always guide you, down the path you know is true.”

McNabb is probably destined to remain just outside the mainstream but he does so with style, integrity and conviction — rare enough commodities these days. Head Like A Rock will do his cause no harm at all.

• Colm O’Hare