It’s a stoned, soft-focus dreamworld of an album. Martyn’s idiosyncratic, slurred, mesmerising vocal delivery is married to an acoustic guitar fed through a battery of electronic effects, though often you’d be hard pressed to identify the Echoplexed, phase-shifted, fuzzed up beats and textures as guitar. Large parts of the album were recorded outdoors, late at night – you can hear the English countryside, ripples of water across a lake, a kind of natural reverb.

It’s chill out, it’s trance (before we knew what that meant).. a kind  of ambient folk. It’s an album for intimacy and solitude. It has glorious love songs in Sweet Certain Surprise (a star turn here for Rico on trombone) and Couldn’t Love You More. The title track features the great Danny Thompson, Martyn’s snaky lead lines buzzing round his bass. Big Muff, co-written with Lee Perry, has Martyn’s hoarse vocals competing with dubby electronic squeaks and squawks and an insistent rhythm. A flock of geese wheels across the soundscape of the trippy Small Hours. A drum machine gently ticks away in the background.

This album is whiskey-soaked and pot-infused, as was its creator. John Martyn was his own man. He died last year. Remember him this way.

“Some of us live like princes, some of us live like queens, most of us live just like me and we don’t know what it means.”

P.S. I could have just as easily written about: Johnny Cash and the album At Folsom Prison

Wonder what K will be?

You know the feeling you get when you’re a little kid, and someone gives you a kaleidoscope – you’ve never seen one before, you point it at a window, put your eye to it and start turning? Ooh..

That’s how I feel when I listen to Blue Roses. Head on over to her MySpace page.

You’ll hear echoes of Bjork, Liz Fraser, Kate Bush.. but mostly you’ll hear Laura Groves.

Lovely stuff. Download ‘Doubtful Comforts‘.