Tim Burgess – I Love The New Sky

While in The Charlatans, Tim’s indefatigable energy has been a consistent fuel for the band across thirteen high-charting albums, his solo adventure has been no less extraordinary, scaling new heights in 2020 with his fifth solo release to date: I Love The New Sky. Released on Bella Union, it features wonderfully connective songs of everyday minutiae and universal experience, of love and anger, of loss and belonging, all united by elaborate yet natural arrangements and an effortless but deceptively expert way with melody.

I Love The New Sky differs from its predecessors in that all twelve tracks were self-penned. I Love The New Sky lands somewhere between Paul McCartney’s RAM and Brian Eno’s Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and certainly that recipe covers both the all-pervasive tunefulness and high quality. Stylistically, though, it runs the widest gamut, from Empathy For The Devil’s gospel style rockabilly skip, through to the sophisticated song-craft of Sweetheart Mercury and the Nilsson-esque Sweet Old Sorry Me, with the angst-y gravitas of Undertow, which Tim describes as “a mood-changer, influenced by 10cc.”