Nowadays (WMP)

(Four Stars)

There’s a really attractive ease to Cyndi Boste’s new album. Not easy listening (though it passes very pleasantly over the shell-likes), nor exactly laidback (though tempos are mostly around mid-pace and overt aggression is avoided). Instead it’s a sense that Boste, fellow guitarist Jeremy Edwards, drummer George Brugmans, bassist Mike Rix and bonus extras such as pedal steel player Roy Payne, violinist Glenny Rae and Hammond player Rob Woolf, fit together like a well loved pair of boots. If How Come comes across like Hank Williams projected into a 1970s bar then Rectify puts Mavis Staples into the back of a Kingswood and Happy Day imagines Charles Bradley if he’d grown up on Stars and Paul Kelly circa the Coloured Girls. Getting the picture? This is adult oriented roots music, soaked in country music which has its own toughness and enhanced by soul-based rock. Boste’s voice has lived, though it never sounds worn away, and she tells a story with the feel of a village elder. That is, with conviction and with ease.

Bernard Zuel