Thomas Bush chases an ace Laila Sakini split with his 3rd solo side of slouched and uncanny DIY chamber pop songcraft, RIYL Flaming Tunes, Mark Glynne & Bart Zwier, Pigbaby.

‘The Next 60 Years’ leads on from Thomas Bush’s 2018 debut for John T Gast’s 5GT and 2022 one for Mammas Mysteriska Jukebox with a half hour inside his curious mind. Somehow fleeting but fixed, the six songs hit a highly satisfying mark of fine-wrought arrangements riddled with strange artefacts ornamenting the ether, clearly distinguished from his work in the fissures of dub techno and ambient pop as RAP, but nevertheless betraying the fingerprints of his bandmate Guy Gormley as co-producer on its micro-dosed, lysergic patina of tape scribbled textures and avant-dub wise mixing. 

Comparisons with Flaming Tunes are surely warranted from the off with his West Coast US-via-East London fusion of harpsichord swag with on-the-turn vocal harmonies in ‘Same Life Flowed’, and which percolate the album thru to the queered hallucination ‘Face in the Water’ and mesh of spindly strings and loner whispers in ‘Flood of Light’. He properly snags us with something like Mark Glynne & Bart Zwier meets Pigbaby on ‘Burn Clear’, especially in the radio interceptions buried deep in the stereo field that caused us to check the speakers were functioning properly, and the curdled tone of ‘Mulligan’ is destined straight for the spiked peaches folder.