John J. Presley
★★★★
Chaos & Calypso
GOD UNKNOWN. CD/DL/LP
Elemental Brighton blues man brings that weird chill.
THOUGH HIS voice rumbles like God rearranging the furniture, John J. Presley is likely closer to the man downstairs, his deliciously amoral tales regularly playing the sinnerman as the hero. Presley’s fire’n’brimstone second album contains precious little calypso, and chaos isn’t really his thing, either – from their simmering slow-build to their eventual explosions into cathartic jazz-skronk (Sea Of Deserters) or distorted noise (The Sequel), ever y element of Presley’s brooding blues songs is expertly placed for precise effect. His uncanny balance of black humour and bleak drama, meanwhile, places him in the lineage of Nick Cave and Mark Lanegan, but while Presley spins tales of a similar gravity to those dark princes, he’s never simply aping them. His gift for economy, meanwhile, is impressive: opener Silhouettes establishes the album’s noirish menace with minimal couplets like, “I come alone/I leave alone”.