Ghosts Outside

Best known for fronting the Beta Band, Steve Mason has spent the past decade walking a path between visionary and eccentric. In 2005, he announced he was quitting music the very day his King Biscuit Time album was released (a European tour had just been booked). Two years later, he was back trying to reinvent himself as a Scottish Nine Inch Nails via The Black Affair. But a doomed romance saw him sour on the project, and vanish from view once again. He returned in the unexpected guise of a sort of one-man-Hot Chip on last year’s Boys Outside, the first record released under his own name. Combining surprisingly mellow songwriting with firebrand politics (Mason is of the view that the only good banker is one doused in lighter fuel), the LP deserved better than its footnote status in the end-of-year round-ups. Now it has been re-imagined as a dark, dense dub album, with the assistance of reggae guitarist and former Thompson Twins and Orange Juice producer Dennis Bovell. Though not as immediately accessible as the source material, Ghosts Outside benefits from its greater subtlety – the throbbing ‘Understand My Dub’ is a creepy gumbo of furnace blast bass, barely-there brass and Mason’s disembodied singing, and ‘Dub On My Heel’ a skittish collision of keys and whispered vocals that suggests something dredged from the dark side of Horace Andy’s subconscious. It’s hard to imagine Ghosts Outside turning Mason’s career around. But for those who have stayed with him until now, it is another reminder of what a singular songwriter he is.