McAlmont & Butler – The Sound of McAlmont & Butler

At the height of Britpop’s increasingly exhausting obsession with laddish 60s revisionism, Bernard Butler and London singer David McAlmont took a markedly different route. Originally released in 1995, this short-lived collaboration borrowed more from Scott Walker, Bacharach and Dusty Springfield than Camden pub rock, wrapping huge orchestrated soul arrangements around McAlmont’s impossibly rich voice. ‘Yes’ still sounds outrageous thirty years on, all swooning strings and open-hearted melodrama delivered with enough conviction to make cynicism feel briefly redundant.

Elsewhere, ‘You Do’, ‘Disappointment’ and ‘Don’t Call It Soul’ balance chamber-pop grandeur against something looser and more spontaneous around the edges. Remarkably coherent for what was effectively an accidental album, these songs still carry themselves with immense poise.