Sex O'Clock

An antipodean sex kitten with a taste for vintage velveteen soul and a history involving Nick Cave? No, it’s not Kylie.

This listener fell for her charms on Mick Harvey’s brace of Serge Gainsbourg records where she did a bewitchingly breathy Bardot.

Here producer Harvey indulges his Barry White/Isaac Hayes/Philly fetish to the maximum (Gil Scott-Heron’s ‘Home Is Where The Hatred Is’ is a shrewd selection), providing empathic backdrops to Lane’s meditations on sex, loneliness and love-as-loss-of-identity.

But, as you’d expect of an album that takes a couple of Bad Seeds jams and loops them into loping grooves, there’s a strong European bias: the smoky Tindersticks/Rossellini whisper of ‘The Next Man That I See’, the partisan Italian lullaby ‘Bella Ciao’ and ‘The Petrol Wife’, which could be Courtney crawling the Berlin Wall.

Sex O’Clock is a pearl. Happy diving.