Tymon Dogg
Album: Made Of Light
Label: Thin Man
Tracks: 10
Website: http://www.tymondogg.com

Tymon's is not an easy talent to describe, although I guess you could start by using the singer-songwriter tag and then refine and qualify it with adjectives like original, individual and maverick – but even then, that's not gonna be half the story. His lyrics display a definite political conscience born of a sensibility that's acutely contemporary, and yet they're couched in ornate musical settings that feel very early-mid-70s albeit with creative use of today's state-of-the-art technology. Interestingly, the 41-minute album's split onto two separate discs, labelled Side One and Side Two respectively – presumably in order to replicate the retro-familiar, comforting physical sensation of turning the record over… Taken either individually or together, the two Sides contain music that's sometimes maddeningly diverse and varies quite a bit in character, as do the songs themselves, veering (sometimes erratically) between serious politically-aware statements and touching, if sometimes enigmatic or ambiguous, romantic whimsy – they're all Tymon's own work, three written in collaboration with E. Murray and one with Joe Strummer.

Which brings me coincidentally to a point of information, for the benefit of those to whom Tymon's name (or else that of his true identity, Stephen Murray) strikes a distant chord but may need some memory-jogging: his main claim to fame probably lies in his period of collaboration with Strummer (notably the track Lose This Skin on The Clash's Sandinista! album) and his subsequent membership of The Mescaleros. But Tymon's career actually began at age 17 when discovered by Paul McCartney, later struggling on through a series of solo singles and albums (check out the 2010 Irrepressible… retrospective collection for an introduction to his world) and various collaborations. Even now, it's not always easy to get a handle on Tymon Dogg's music, as it can be elusive – and yet many individual moments along the journey are very striking and make an immediate impression.

The opening song, Conscience Money, is a brilliantly realised piece that expresses the twin-faceted nature of its lyric, whose private squalor is barely concealed behind the façade of a refined pseudo-baroque musical setting complete with violins and harpsichord. The Strummer co-write track, the anti-meat-market invective Pound Of Grain, is without doubt an album standout, irresistibly catchy and with a pounding, driving tribal-punk rhythm backing Tymon's rough-edged vitriolic singing (here inhabiting a kind of middle-ground between John Lydon's Public Image and a slightly more declamatory Peter Hammill) voicing rhetorical questions like "Is this what Bobbie Dylan meant when he sang hard rain?". Other songs are thoughtful and gentler considerations of simple, compassionate humanitarian messages, demonstrating that he really does care and that (as on As I Make My Way) there is hope after all.

The whining, sounding-over-highly-pitched feature of Tymon's slightly nasal vocal delivery may (at first?) irritate some listeners more used to rounded tone, cultured beauty or extravagant power-singing, but Tymon's singing style also has a peculiar kind of delicate precision and an element of vulnerable charm (especially on the pair of ballads As I Make My Way and DMT on the second disc) that's as much "oddball English" as anything else. His instrumental prowess is also impressive, particularly on the violin; there's real passion in his playing, and he sure knows how to score and blend timbres into swirling, swooning, wailing, sometimes exotic soundscapes involving piano and multiple violins – floridly inventive much in the manner of Stackridge. Tymon plays everything you hear on the album except for drums on one track (Liam Genockey).

So you might find Tymon's music puzzling, at times slightly infuriating maybe, and (like all products of a proverbial bordering-on-genius talent) not always all that easy to appraise, let alone wholeheartedly embrace. But do give Tymon's music a chance (helped by the accommodating package which helpfully includes full lyrics), and odds are that you'll be glad you did, at least most of the time.

David Kidman