Hardstone Psycho Review

This is the record where the atmosphere gets a spine. The palette expands to include distorted guitar, live sounding drums and arrangements that build rather than loop, and crucially the sequencing has been thought about, so the album moves between heavy and weightless instead of sitting in one fog for an hour. Bandit is enormous and completely unlike anything he had done before.

Attitude has a beat with genuine violence in it. Deep in the Water and Ice Age show the range without breaking the mood. Kryptonite closes it well. The lyrical content is unchanged, the same drifting phrases about wealth and women, but for the first time the music is interesting enough that the emptiness stops being the main event. It is a real step forward and it suggests there is a much better album coming if he ever decides to write one.