Two years on from the Nitin Sawhney-produced Searching for the Hows and Whys, Sam (Get Cape) Duckworth is back on a small indie label, still lamenting the ways of the world, but with less interesting arrangements dressing up his basic folk-rock style.
The most far-flung it gets is when Baaba Maal's vocal and an African-flavoured acoustic guitar riff feature in "All of This Is Yours", one of several laboured attempts to fuse disparate genres. There's brutalist electro-metal on "All Falls Down", cheesy horns bringing a half-hearted Plan B-style ersatz soul to "Nightlife" and "Collapsing Cities", and all manner of ill-fitting, dated drum'n'bass percussion attempting to add interest to Duckworth's bargain-basement demagoguery. I prefer the bare guitar and vocals sections, which for all their naïveté have a sincerity lacking elsewhere.
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