MIKAMI, KAN - -1 (Minus 1)

With the coming of spring, another year brings another bulletin from the mind of post-war Japans greatest blues singing surrealist poet, Kan Mikami. Part of the pleasure of Mikamis annual solo releases on PSF is plotting the changes in his rough-cut voice and guitar style. This time around the blues and enka feel of the last two or three albums has been pruned back to a more restrained psychedelic core. The voice too seems deliberately held in check, the melismatic flourishes excised in favour of a plain and meditative directness. The lyrics are as scabrous and bewildering as ever, focusing again and again on images of his native place in the north of Japan, but also devising a great triptych of spread legs, Bush and the wall of a Dada toilet. Another classic, then. Six tracks, twenty-nine minutes. Lyrics in Japanese and English. -- Alan Cummings