1. Go to Mexico

2. Closer to You

3. Easy Rider

4. It Would Be So Easy

5. Red River Valley

6. Poet

7. I Want to Be Loved

8. Lost

9. Strike a Match

10. Tarot
     

After a couple of so-so albums, Cassandra Wilson has finally lost control of her musical senses. For some inexplicable reason, the services of T-Bone Burnett have been employed as a producer. Whereas he may have performed sterling work for Sam Phillips, his lack of sensitivity and total misunderstanding of Ms Wilson’s style makes one shudder in disbelief.

Here we have mundane and uninteresting songs, played by listless and unimaginative musicians, all stirred into a turgid and overblown mixture by the appalling failings of Burnett. Wilson's voice needs chambers and chambers of echo like Burnett wishes for a hole in the head. Come to think of it …

Gone are the minimalist arrangements of previous albums, to be replaced by floods of vaguely-trip-hop and vaguely-ambient instrumentation, which drown out Wilson’s normally tantalising voice in great rushes of irritating digital synthesis. When, in the sleeve notes, one sees various people being credited with “programming”, one knows that trouble looms ahead. To have three drummers on one track — one of whom is the venerable and apparently aged Jim Keltner — then only three words spring to mind: boring, boring, boring.

If there's only one album you don't buy this year, make sure this is it.

©  Straight Words, 2006