CD review: Jim Bob, What I Think About… (The Ten Forty Sound)

The low-slung swaggering “My New Walk” is a damning dissection of masculinity that has a cumulative power like no other rock song I’ve heard in recent years.

“Monster in a Tracksuit” cuts to the bone of the Savile case while raising a guilty smile (too soon? Not for our JB).

And then, along with the Ramones-tempo rockers, there’s an off-kilter ballad or two of touching simplicity.

The whole is then wrapped up in charming chamber-orchestra string arrangements that gratefully acknowledge a debt to the late 1960s/early 1970s sound of The Beatles and T. Rex.

This short, sharp album is the best thing (including his on-off involvement with Carter USM) that the man has ever recorded.