Joseph Arthur - 'Nuclear Daydream' (Lonely Astronaut) Released 03/09/07

Joseph Arthur's hotly tipped fifth album, 'Nuclear Daydream', marks him out from a lesser known to a widely assured artist who has moved on from the overwrought, gnarly and melancholic singer-songwriter that made some of his Real World albums challenging material at times. 'Our Shadows Will Remain' showed a more accessible side, and emotions on 'Nuclear Daydream' are more ebullient and life-affirming, showing a mature command with the song-craft buoyed with laid-back acoustic melodies and an album that maintains a lyrical ambiguity - whether it be addressing decay through needles and pills or the political map with the emotional scars of Hurricane Katrina's foul winds.

Set to rich acoustic textures with vocal multitracking of Joseph's falsetto and sonorous tenor, 'Nuclear Daydream' appears at many listens to be Joseph's most open and transparent album to date yet seems counter-poised betwixt the personal and political worlds and sits easily in both, maintaining a certain inscrutability and enigma with an absence of any continuous narrative thread between the tracks.

The pop opener 'Too Much To Hide' references needles from the off - "The needle says she'll tell when she's through..." and the George Harrison pop stylings with tapping tambourine set a tempo, but the coffee-and-cream vocals of Joseph's 'Black Lexus' proves worth its weight in gold - "...you can't find her/ in the mirror everything's reversed..." with a simple acoustic guitar arrangement that finds the missing link between Roy Orbison and Bob Dylan, and the spirit elan continues with The Kinks jingle of 'Enough To Get Away' finding affirmation in a world of unease - "...I know what I found/ must be in  paradise...".

Tracks such as 'Electrical Storm' and 'You Are Free'
show the Midas touch with textured vocals that manage to lodge in the space between reverie and memory, the former with hypnotic chords and a poetasters eye on the life cycle - "...you are born and then you die...", and the riffs and mouth organ of 'You Are Free' like a track lifted from Neil Young's 'Harvest' with the existential verse - "...I'm no longer who I was/ no longer who I thought I was...not afraid of losing myself/ ain't no self to lose...".