TOM McRae looks at life askew. This Suffolk son of divorced vicars - God really does move in mysterious ways - finds small consolation in his third album of melancholic introspection.
"There are fewer songs about killing... although the sunshine of California clearly hasn't made the songs any happier," he says.
By California he means his three-week spurt of recording in the haunted stables of The Paramour, a hilltop house in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, with a history of strange occurrences.
Just the place then for McRae and his bookish, sober ballads "for the restless, not the peaceful sleepers", newly furnished by Beck's backing band.
McRae "fell off the map" last year, but his songs of loss, love and dislocation hit the emotional radar with an accuracy beyond the over-hyped Damien Rice and James Blunt.
Updated: 16:39 Wednesday, June 15, 2005
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