Jackie Leven - Shining Brother Shining Sister (Cooking Vinyl)

Mike Davies of NetRhythms describes the album as Leven's 15th solo record, following 2001's Creatures of Light and Darkness, by which point he is “firmly ensconced in the ranks of cult”. Lending his “rich peat whisky voice”, Leven delivers a collection of poetic, Celtic-infused soulful pop veined with rockabilly, jazz and even hip hop, “all aged in the oak of reflective melancholy”.

Even the apparently buoyant “Irresistible Romance”, with its skirl of pipes and a drum fade-out, inspired by Peter Ackroyd's London, is full of ragged street kids and people trapped in relentlessly imprisoning jobs. The songs are concerned with loss, through death, ended relationships or the passing of industries, or, as in “Another Man In The Old Arcade”, with the halting resolution not to let things slip away. The despairing realisation of wasted life and misguided anger in “Classic Northern Diversions” and the dreams blown away in “Heroin Dealer” (a bitter fable about a man Leven once knew) are counterpointed by rays of optimism: the hope of healing in “A Little Voice In Space” and the centuries-spanning love of “1798”.

Davies particularly stresses Leven's commitment to poetry: “1798” sets a poem by Ciaran Carson, and there are lines by Edith Sitwell, Rilke (the short horror story “Faces”, spoken by David Thomas), e. e. cummings (read by Ron Sexsmith), Robert Bly (who contributes his own spoken words) and Osip Mandelstam. This restates a commitment to a form whose power the world and the industry largely overlook. He is not sure that any single song matches “The Sexual Loneliness of Jesus Christ” or “Exit Wounds” (properly “Exit Wound”) from the previous album, but finds the cumulative effect haunting, and the evocative trumpet instrumental “Dust Elegy” “something quite special”.