Richard Butler

Album Review

Coming nearly two decades after the Psychedelic Furs began their long, slow slide into irrelevance, Richard Butler's first solo album starts very promisingly with the haunting folk-tronica of "Good Days, Bad Days," which reveals an unexpected delicacy in Butler's vocals. Singing in falsetto instead of his usual Bowie-derived croon, Butler sounds newly energized in a way the Furs' latter-day records never did, although the mixture of a full string section and a closing Hendrixian guitar solo recall the epic sweep of their best work. The rest of the album continues in the same intimate style, with "California" borrowing bits from William Blake's "Jerusalem" in the course of its emotional crescendo, and "Breathe" going for a ghostly space rock feel under Butler's unusually out-front vocals. There's a mournful quality to this set of songs — the press kit mentions both the death of Butler's father and the breakup of his marriage — but Butler and collaborator Jon Carin, who both produces and plays most of the instruments, keep things on the right side of depressive for the most part, and overall, Richard Butler is a mature, thoughtful comeback.