Pop seems to be riven with collaboration fever at the moment, as everyone from Tricky to the Prodigy goes in search of ever more unlikely people to work with. As far as this goes, Tim Booth, whose day job is as singer with the English group James, has outdone them all. Angelo Badalamenti is best known for having composed the ethereal soundtracks to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet, and his capture by Booth is quite a coup. On the whole, Booth and the Bad Angel sounds more like a James record than a Badalamenti one, veering as it does between up-tempo pop and often self-consciously dark slow-burners. For all that, it does contain traces of the composer’s textural genius – he thinks of his sound as “tragically beautiful” – in the ambient sweep of a synthesised string section here, the tentative lilt of a piano line there. Essentially though, this is a souped-up rock album, a James album with extra weird bits and a few good tunes, and it’s pleasant enough.
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