Places of Unknowing

As midlife introspection deep dives go, this one’s a doozy. Over a long career, Jamie Lidell has done everything from the most brain-scouring and underground of techno to modernist funk-soul that got him gigs supporting James Brown, Prince and Elton John. But after a very circuitous route, ending up with him living in Nashville, and a nine year gap between albums, he returned with this deep and dark set of reflections on adulthood, responsibility, ageing, neurodivergence and dark nights of the soul. It’s come out of heavy immersion in David Sylvian and Berlin-era Bowie and it shows, but Lidell’s unique singing voice and production talents – which he flexes with an inventiveness and weirdness that harks back to his very early 2000s work with Super_Collider and on his solo debut LP Muddlin Gear – take it to altogether new places. It’s often claustrophobic, angry, even bleak, but it’s also very human and very beautiful.