Album: Vincent Gallo

When, Warp

Having written, directed and starred in his own movie, Buffalo 66, Vincent Gallo qualifies as what the film industry calls a "triple-threat" artist – a term also applicable to his music career, judging by When, which he wrote, performed and produced in its entirety. An odd choice of album for the predominantly electronic Warp label to release, When presents Gallo as a cross between Chet Baker and Tim Buckley, his understated, vulnerable vocals recalling the former's opiated stillness, while the delicately layered guitar settings resemble the open-ended extemporisations of Buckley albums such as Lorca. Though eschewing the digital world of samplers and computers, Gallo's work is clearly informed by the same aesthetic, with instrumentals such as "I Wrote This Song for the Girl Paris Hilton" and "My Beautiful White Dog" featuring smears of mellotron, mellow sax, guitar and sundry ambient noises anchored by the most desultory of trip-hop drum patterns. There's an appealing, ingenuous quality to love odes like "Laura" and "Honey Bunny" that contradicts the more complex emotional tropes in operation on the title-track, where Gallo admits his own ambivalent response to intimacy: "When you come near to me, I go away/When things are clear to me, I go away." The result is a lovely, ruminative album whose exemplary chill-out credentials are subtly tempered by doubt and uncertainty.