Really like this record. Perhaps my Jane Weaver album of the year album in the absence of anything from Jane this year. Inner Song the second from Kelly Lee Owens. Percolating electronic music, groovy, syncopated and slightly other worldly.
Plucked from the shelf totally at random on a Bank Holiday Monday when I was looking for something new to listen to and strangely thinking about The Human League, as I was just about to start an immersion in their back catalogue with Temporary Fandoms, the Facebook group I'm a member of.
I had no expectations at all of this as I'd never heard of Owens but very glad I took a chance on it because it's fantastic. Owens is a DJ, hailing from Wales and here is a wonderful case in point of an artist finding their voice.
This is both experimental and accessible. It certainly has the Human League and Seventies electronic dance and Krautrock adventurism in its DNA. I was also reminded of Leftfield's fantastic Leftism sometimes. Occasionally, just occasionally it gets ever so slightly saccharine, (I skipped a track halfway through) but for the most part Owens gets things just right.
Then suddenly, four tracks from the finishing tape comes the record's greatest and most welcome surprise. On Corner of the Sky, Owens compatriot John Cale guests. Magisterial and inimitable in tone, for the seven minutes the track lasts the album is dragged into another realm altogether. Especially when Cale slips into Welsh. The track has a wonderful mythic quality, like a great Ted Hughes poem. It's one of the best things I've heard all year.
Inner Song has much else to recommend it. It's an album to discover and go back to and get to know some more. An hour in a flotation tank free of life's cares and woes. What more could you want.
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