Album Review: Perry Blake, Songs of Praise

There’s more than a hint of the conventionally spiritual about Perry Blake’s first album in over a decade – what with the album title and songs named ‘Miracle’ and ‘Evensong’. But Blake directs his praise not upwards to some imagined deity, but backwards to less oppressive times. Indeed, Songs Of Praise is a resilient rebirth, and includes ‘So Many Things’, the sultry romantic hit ballad he bequeathed to French chanteuse Françoise Hardy.

Electric chimes beckon the faithful for ‘Diamonds In The Sun’, before it erupts into a more playful scenario, and a full-blooded choir heralds a ‘Miracle’ before it mutates into despair and industrial Bowie. Its unsettling, Orwellian feel returns in ‘Wrote You A Letter’. ‘Boxes’ shows that real men can be inspired by Kate Bush too, as a relationship is dismantled for re-forwarding, and ‘Evensong’ has a languid quality you want to bathe in long after it’s passed.

The Bowie influence is to the fore again on ‘Some Kind Of Magical’ with its gothic vocal. ‘The Lives Of Strangers’ sways against a sumptuous soundscape, while the upbeat ‘80s synth-pop feel and limp vocals of ‘Broken Little Orphan’ seem out of place amid the darkness. The album closer ‘Charlie Chaplin’ pleads for privacy in an age when all our moves are digitised and monetised.

Along the way we can luxuriate in Blake’s generous, comforting voice – spotting traces of Nick Drake and Gary Numan, trip-hop and electronica. Phil Ware contributes deft keyboards, and the production by Graham Murphy and Chris O’Brien serves the project well. Broadening his lyrical subject matter beyond the merely personal also expands Blake’s musical vision.