Music: Chuck Prophet

Sublime guitarist, lyricist and songwriter is back with another beauty.

From the neo-Motown beat of the title track to the anthemic ‘Wish Me Luck’, to the electric finger picked ‘Guilty As A Saint’ and the pizzicato stringed ‘Lonely Desolation’, and the Tom Pettyesque mid-tempo rocker ‘Laughing On The Inside’, Chuck Prophet’s new album Night Surfer is as fine an album as you’ll hear all year, such is the masterful combination of rock, pop and roots.

As Prophet has said about the album: “It’s all about going forward, about looking around and imagining where we’ll be in 20 years if we just follow that path. And of course, you’ll find a persistent anxiety throughout; we live, after all, in anxious times.”

On Night Surfer, Prophet’s guitar ‘snakes and harmonises’ but this time he has some back up in the form of REM’s Peter Buck, who lends some Byrdsesque six string action here and there. “Is it just me, or is that dude a hook machine or what?” asks Prophet.

This fabulous guitarist first came to notice as a precocious teenager, who, along with Dan Stuart and Green On Red, put out several seminal country and desert rock albums such as Here Come The Snakes. Since their demise in 1992, Prophet has been a prolific artist – Night Surfer is his 13th studio album – and consistent with it. He’s a songwriter who always brings a strong element of wryness to his lyrics, whether in bringing his characters to life or reflecting on misdemeanours past and present, but this time with an all-imagining eye into a future unknown.

With the current resurgence in authentic yet contemporary rock’n’roll, Prophet has taken the rare step of covering another artist’s song; Ezra Furman’s ‘If I Was A Baby’ gets the ballady yet unsentimental treatment. And following track ‘Ford Econoline’ pays homage to one of his favoured cars, a vehicle where much went on, and much was discussed. Peter Buck supplies fantastic guitar on here, too …

Final track ‘Love Is The Thing’ lets rip with some tribal drum thunder before segueing into a quasi-glam stomper via some dirty blues riffing. It’s brilliant, and I reckon the gig will be too.
The Haunt, Thurs 9 Oct, 7pm, £16