Philip Selway
★★★
Strange Dance
BELLA UNION. CD/DL/LP
Radiohead drummer’s lavishly produced third solo outing.
Strange Dance finds Philip Selway’s hushed, conspiratorial vocals garlanded by Hannah Peel’s extravagant, wide-screen orchestrations, gleaming idiophones, deluxe electronics, Laura Moody’s cello and Adrian Utley’s guitars – he even cedes the drum stool to the dextrous Valentina Magaletti. Initially moody, ultimately towering opener Little Things evinces Selway’s film score work – imagine latter-period Bowie doing the theme for an unusually arty Bond movie – while the title track is built from a lattice of processed, industrial percussion offset by banks of lyrical strings and ethereal female ululations. Lyrically, Selway eschews metaphor in favour of unambiguous existential questions (“What if there’s a lightning strike on the plane?” he entreats on Make It Go Away) or what might be snippets of supportive conversations with troubled friends. Occasionally, the vaulting arrangements threaten to overwhelm what is a naturally lower-case singing voice, but the ambition here cannot be faulted.