Album: Terry Hall & Mushtaq

The Hour Of Two Lights, Honest Jon's

Invited by Damon Albarn to record an album for the Blur singer's Honest Jon's label, the former Specials front man, Terry Hall, has expanded this project into a full-blown world music crossover, collaborating with the one-time Fun-Da-Mentalist Mushtaq and a sizeable contingent of musicians, mostly from the Arab and Jewish diasporas, wielding oud, ney, dhol, clarinet, accordion and sundry mid-Eastern percussion. First impressions suggested a fairly routine series of pan-cultural, trans-global mixes, their dated trip-hop beats adding little to the dominant Arabic, gypsy and Hebrew strains; pleasant, but hardly ground-breaking stuff. But I've grown to particularly enjoy the more reggae-inflected tracks, such as the sardonic "A Tale of Woe", and "Ten Eleven", on which the blind Algerian rapper Mohammed chats up a storm, and where Albarn chips in his two pennyworth, too. The overall theme of the album is the need for cultural empathy, a belief borne out in the coming-together of singers from diverse backgrounds, their various contributions rendering the lyric booklet a typesetter's nightmare of different alphabets. But while there are some exquisite individual moments here - Herinderpal Panesar's beautiful dhol flute solo in the title-track, and the dashing klezmer clarinet break in "This and That"- the accumulated weight of Terry Hall's glumness casts its own pall over the proceedings, when a more positive celebration of diversity might have been more appropriate. Any gloomier, and he'd be heading the way of Killing Joke's Jaz Coleman.