Albums of the Year # 45 Sweet Baboo - Wild Imagination

From San Francisco to deepest Wales on this journey through the records that made me sit up and take notice this year. Here's Sweet Baboo, and an album I wrote about in June:

             'You say you like dancing. I put on some Beatles and some old rock and roll...'

There's something distinctive and quite specific about Welsh alternative artists somehow. A shared eccentric sensibility, an innocent purity that often stems from cosy domesticity, that's shared by Super Furry Animals, Cate Le Bon, Gorkys, H.Hawkline even the Manics and Sweet Baboo, possibly the most domesticated of all, who has a new album just out entitled Wild Imagination.

'Yesterday you were on fire. But today don't you know. I'm on a roll.'

It's a charming record and already a go to one for me on stressful days at work. Check out the cocktail snacks on display here and it will give you an idea of where it's coming from. Steven Black, a.k.a. Sweet Baboo, 'the most androgynous woman since Mo Tucker,' according to friend and supporter Le Bon, 

                                                   'Step out onto the pink rainbow...'

Wild Imagination is a timpani fueled delight, full of parping trumpets and gentle entreaties to Baboo's muse to come over and share a pot of tea and some cake. Ten tunes of lo-fi romance from a man wearing NHS specs and a Shetland jumper with a gentle whispered delivery soundtracking the moment where the geek inherits the earth. He has almost single-handedly been kept afloat as a concern by Marc Riley, BBC 6 Music DJ over the last few years for which we should all be eternally grateful. Surrender to Sweet Baboo!

                                                            'Why am I tired. I have a pretty easy life...'