(Chelsea Records CDCR 702010)
A new Peter Daltrey album is always an exciting event in itself: the expectation of it being another alliance with Louisiana's finest, Damien Youth, whets the appetite further still.
Although this is Daltrey's eleventh solo outing, it's his third with the American folk-psych songsmith - ably assisted by Joe Pesci, Dave 'Fingers' Carver and Peter's son Oli -- and this time under the flag of The Morning Set. Arguably, it's the strongest, conventional Daltrey/Youth set to date; conventional only in the sense that their best work until now, the largely-acoustic Nevergreen, was more of a thematic piece best enjoyed as a whole. The Morning Set contains ten songs of a startlingly-accessible nature. The phrase 'radio-friendly' springs to mind, but don't let that fool you. As immediate as these songs are, they improve with repeated playing, revealing a greater depth thanks to the dependable union of Peter Daltrey's lyrical- and Damien Youth's melodic-mastery. In Youth, Daltrey has found the ideal creative foil. Much like his Kaleidoscope/Fairfield Parlour compadre Eddy Pumer, both share the same happy knack of pulling that killer hook out of the bag when required. As the promotional strap line has it: "Yer going to be singing these songs forever!"
The filmic The Hymn of the Singing Man, with its Zimmerman drawl and brooding Link Wray guitar trills, could almost be a sonic sibling of Dylan's Ballad of a Thin Man reworked for the Tarantino generation. However, for every darker moment, we're treated to breezier bursts of tune smithery, such as Wheels of Romance, which bears all the deftness of touch that was Fairfield Parlour's trademark.