RICHARD HAWLEY'S MOOD MUSIC

Richard Hawley’s new album “Truelove’s Gutter” begins with a song that is funereally slow. You wonder why on earth he opened with it, until you hear the other seven tracks—which are all slow too. After almost winning the Mercury Music Prize with “Coles Corner” and inching further into the mainstream with “Lady’s Bridge”, Hawley could have just offered more of the same. But his record company, Mute, apparently urged him to do whatever he wanted, “regardless of commercial concerns”.

He kept some things exactly as they were, nursing his quiff and his fags, playing crystalline guitar solos, recording in Sheffield and taking his title from another forgotten part of town. But he went out on a limb with the mood (so late-night, it’s almost the next morning) and the arrangements. The music is fearlessly minimal, with Hawley’s voice, deep and contemplative, often backed by just a shimmer of strings, a brush of percussion or something more exotic, such as the glass harmonica or the crystal baschet. This is slow food, and much of it is delicious.

"Truelove’s Gutter" (Mute) by Richard Hawley, out now

~ TIM DE LISLE