Album Review: Pierce Turner - 'Terrible Good'

Let it be trumpeted across the land: Pierce Turner has made a guitar album.

No, not a cosy acoustic string-fest with songs about clouds passing over prelapsarian forests, but a gloriously noisy electric sort of thing with former Bowie wingman Gerry Leonard on guitar and production, plus bass, drums, brass and string flavourings, and ambient studio wizardry.

The outcome is that Terrible Good works extremely well, with a consistently cohesive band sound underpinning Turner’s unique voice, while his perennially penetrating lyrical eye still reaches deep into the doings of mankind.

In the magnificent ‘Where It Should Be’, Pierce sings about watching his father walking up a hill to hospital; and in the stridently poppy ‘Tommy and Timmy’, he warbles affectionately about two friends and the sport of hurling. ‘Love of Angels’ is riff-redolent of the Rolling Stones and namechecks them alongside Chopin; and he covers his own ‘More’ from 3 Minute World, reworking it to give it a more dramatic, pseudo-Eastern feel.

To these ears, only ‘Set A Few Things Up’ might be regarded as filler, but there’s no doubting that Terrible Good is indeed terribly good, born into a musical paradise where Van Morrison might co-exist with The Radiators and The Undertones. And even if that doesn’t immediately ring the right kind of bell for you, give Pierce Turner’s latest salvo a listen.

He is, after all, a unique and fascinating talent –and always, but always, worth hearing.

8/10

Listen: ‘Where It Should Be’

Terrible Good is out now via StorySound Records.