“This, quite possibly, could be a really good night,” declared David Crosby. He’s a couple of songs into this show, one of only two UK dates on the tour promoting his current album Sky Trails. Looking trim, beaming and in impeccable voice, the 77-year-old known as Croz fulfils his prophecy – and then some.

Of all the great country superstars of his era, Willie Nelson is truly the last man standing (as was made clear by the title of his last album… Last Man Standing). In his mid-80s his output has, if anything, become more prolific. However, if his 1970s outlaw persona could peek into the future and see what 2018 Willie was up to, he might be surprised.

The meanderings and bickerings of an extraordinary mother and daughter as they roam or lounge around a semi-derelict house and overgrown garden on Long Island have become a cult since the 1975 release of Albert and David Maysles' documentary Grey Gardens.

This woozy, seductive slice of gothic Americana is the Canadian quartet’s first album in six years, a swampy follow-up to the icy, winter-inspired sounds of their last offering, The Wilderness. 

How great is Uniform Distortion? As great as Greg Sage’s Straight Ahead or Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s Ragged Glory or Dungen’s Ta det lugnt or Alex Chilton’s Like Flies On Sherbert. That’s how great Uniform Distortion is.

For his fifth solo album (not counting last year’s delayed soundtrack to Set Fire to the Stars) Welsh singer-songwriter and sometime Super Furry frontman Gruff Rhys inhabits an imaginary landscape in order to deal with issues that are all too real. Like its filmic predecessor, it has been a long time coming. The songs were recorded back in 2016 and, given the world's trajectory in the ensuing years, the dystopian landscape Rhys paints could easily be seen as visionary. 

The reason for the delay was not to encourage comparisons with Nostradamus but to ensure that composer Stephen McNeff was available to score the songs. The best things really do come to those who wait. The orchestration drives but never overpowers, and is delivered with a beautifully harnessed sense of sympathy. The same is true of the band that Rhys gathered for this project. In particular, the basslines provided by Stephen Black (Sweet Baboo) are astounding, marrying form and function in a way that would make Carol Kaye proud. 

Rhys manages to inject humanist hope into scenarios with a gentle unfolding of the human conditionThe songs on Babelsberg contain timeless echoes of songwriting royalty. Touchstones include Scott Walker, Lee Hazelwood and Jimmy Webb but, crucially, at no point does this feel like anything other than a Gruff Rhys record. Rhys has one of the most distinctive voices in modern songwriting, and the fact that this cuts through such a diverse range of work is testament to his vision. 

The scope of this collection feels bigger than previous solo outings. These are songs that depict a world gone wrong, heading for a catastrophic date with destiny. Rhys manages to inject humanist hope into this beak backdrop by invoking a sense of compassion and a belief that all might not be lost. “They threw me out of the club, into the darkest alley,” he sings in “The Club”. It’s a wonderful rendering of the sentiment felt by nearly half of the country as we stagger into the darkened cul-de-sac of independence from Brussels. Yet even here there is optimism as the song ends in defiance with “I pick myself up into the blazing sunset.” 

The sunset also features in the album’s closer, the apocalyptic duet with Lily Cole, “Selfies in the Sunset”. As well as containing one of the funniest lyrics I’ve heard in years, “Mel Gibson howls with rage / The worst Hamlet of his age”, the song tempers the dread of oncoming armegeddon with the line, “Wake me in the morning at the beginning of a new dawn.” It’s a gently buoyant ending for an album that sees Rhys offer the best of songs for the end of times. 

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@jahshabby

Overleaf: watch the video for 'Frontier Man'