Revolve and Rotate

Luke Daniels’ last album What's Here, What's Gone found him evolving from a well-respected button accordion virtuoso to a more-than-respectable contemporary singer-songwriter. Lest he might conceivably be accused of resting on his laurels after producing such a striking album, he's apparently spent the last year or so finding and painstakingly restoring a rare 19th-century music box called a polyphon, then reverse engineering the Victorian technology in order to write the first full piece for the instrument in well over a century. The instrument makes an interesting musical contribution to tracks here, such as the original ‘Fifteen Hours in a Supermarket’ and the traditional ‘Canadee I O’, based on the Nic Jones arrangement. For my money, though, the real backbone of the album consists of Daniels’ increasingly muscular own songs, where he's more conventionally backed by the likes of James Fagan. More than a few, notably ‘If This Town That We Love’ or ‘Three Servants’, already sound like future classics.