Album: Jackie Leven

Creatures of Light & Darkness (Cooking Vinyl)

Another fine offering from Leven, building on the (artistic) success of last year's Defending Ancient Springs, and utilising much the same group of musicians, including Ubu-man David Thomas, former James trumpeter Andy Diagram and former Christian Henry Priestman. Again, Leven's recurrent interests – poetry, people, a heightened sense of place – dominate, particularly those musings occasioned by gender differences and parental relationships. Songs such as "Hidden World Of She" ("she got a power/she can turn a mighty river still") and "Billy Ate My Pocket" (in which the narrator's adulterous leanings are spookily laid bare by a horse's bite) wield the mythopoeic power of traditional folk forms, while "My Spanish Dad" simply and movingly celebrates small but significant moments shared with his late father. The arrangements feature the familiar, folksy Caledonian Soul that Leven's made his own, with Michael Cosgrave's accordion and David Thomas's melodeon adding warmth and mystery to "Rainy Day Bergen Women", in which Thomas's coughing fit and glimpses of the eponymous women combine in a gestalt apprehension of Leven's father's death. Not all familial obligations are as emotionally satisfying, however: perhaps the most striking of the album's songs is another paternal rumination, "The Sexual Loneliness of Jesus Christ", wherein the saviour laments his essential solitude, which persists despite his apparently limitless powers.