Random Acts Of Kindness

Passion. And faith. Gavin Harte's got it by the bucketload. And Random Acts Of Kindness is as articulate and combustible a calling card as he could possibly wish for.

As a prominent campaigner on environmental issues, Harte's been embroiled in enough heated debates to destroy a truckload of Monsanto's genetically modified crops, and he's not shy of polemic on this, his debut album either.

What's so spirit shocking about Random Acts Of Kindness is its sheer timelessness and rootlessness. Listening to the samples, the spare vocals and the muted percussion, it's impossible to place it in any specific geography. It could just as easily be a child of Neneh Cherry or of Yossou N'Dour.

And that's just as it should be, given its subject preoccupations of environmental rape and pillage, and the global desertification that we ignore with valium eyes and prozaced brains.

'Ozone' is perhaps the exception that proves the rule. Continually looping back to a chorus of youths pleading ''Hey Gavin how do you fix a hole in the sky?', it then embarks on a journey signposted by foreboding basslines and resigned, almost passive drums that not only befit the subject, but underline it at every chord change.

Random Acts Of Kindness is hardly bedtime listening, unless your idea of a nightcap is to devour political treatises by the spoonful. All manner of Achilles's tendons are uncovered here: everything from the marching season to the guffaws that belch from the bellies of world bankers at the very mention of debt cancellation. In short, a 'Global Economics 101' gift wrapped between a CD cover.

And if all of this sounds a tad wearisome, or preachy, fear not. Because Random Acts stands very much on its own merits, with or without the lyrical content. Bolstered by the finest string and horn arrangements (courtesy of Kevin Murphy and Belinda Morris), Harte reveals a fine Haughey-esque ear for the gross, the unprecedented, the bizarre and the unbelievable.

As an exercise in polemics, Random Acts Of Kindness (what a wonderful title that is) succeeds because it manages broad brushstrokes on a canvas that has the confidence to take the weight of its material. As a debut album, Gavin Harte has lodged a mighty fine calling card in the in-tray. Bet it won't be long before his phone starts hopping.