AN enraptured recording by a narcissistic tap dancer. Unusual, but with Canadian sprite Hawksley Workman, you learn to expect the unexpected.
Workman plays every note, a madcap fusion of Queen and Jacques Brel, shot through with surrealist humour and a bad case of lust. Workman leaves behind the oblique tunes of his eye-opening debut, For Him And The Girls, in favour of a more commercial approach - guitars and a wall of operatic voices.
It is a confident recording. A stadium-sized ambition is revealed in the turbo-charged opener Striptease; a libidinous strut worthy of Prince in his primetime. The glam cabaret material predominates, but when the spotlight goes down on Hawksley, the protean star, to reveal a romantic balladeer with a powerful voice and Byronic demeanour, you begin to sense the artist's real potential. More often than not overblown, but a most welcome piece of showboating nevertheless.
Updated: 09:16 Thursday, August 15, 2002
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