Dave Cloud and the Gospel of Power – Practice in the Milky Way

Dave Cloud's is an authentically American eccentricity, forged in the mould of Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart. His bizarrely lo-fi form of country-inflected garage rock, which has evolved over four decades of bewildering and antagonistic stage performances, forms the background on Practice in the Milky Way to musings on subjects ranging from Guy De Maupassant to nudist beaches. The album has a weirdly murky feel, which would get tiresome, were it not for the endlessly inventive lyrical content.

If anything like a cohesive persona emerges here, it's that of a lecherous scandaliser of American social mores. Cloud looks to subvert this on Mrs Crumb, which features a female voice reprimanding the 'raunchy, reckless and reprehensible' male figure; but nonetheless, not all listeners will find his smutty humour endearing. In an increasingly constrained US moral climate, however, Cloud reminds us of what a true American maverick sounds like: mischievous and confrontational, but never boring. [Sam Wiseman]