It’s six albums in for this below-the-radar UK-based experimentalist, and as his recordings become increasingly sonically sophisticated, the similarities to Brian Eno’s mellifluous singing voice seem to grow. But rest assured, Tucker is no mere Eno wannabe.
These tunes are invention-rich environments, percolated with intimate and ingenious soundworlds containing looped rainfall, tangling windchimes, primitive berimbau-like drones, glitchy percussives and hallucinatory harmonising. Incidents from childhood, relationships and other intimacies provide the starting point for several of the six songs here, but don’t expect the usual singer-songwriter confessional.
Rising through waves of bustling acoustic guitar and undulating synths, his words trawl deep into the subconscious, pulling the listener on an undertow of surreally associative games that revel in their poetic obliqueness and abstract imagery.
For all the wilful obscurity, even the most terse and cryptic of pieces on the album has a habit of getting inside your head in the time-honoured tradition of all good earworms. Exquisite.
