Album: Terry Hall & Mushtaq

Invited by Damon Albarn to record an album for the Blur singer's Honest Jon's label, the former Specials front man, Terry Hall, has expanded this project into a full-blown world music crossover, collaborating with the one-time Fun-Da-Mentalist Mushtaq and a sizeable contingent of musicians, mostly from the Arab and Jewish diasporas, wielding oud, ney, dhol, clarinet, accordion and sundry mid-Eastern percussion. First impressions suggested a fairly routine series of pan-cultural, trans-global mixes, their dated trip-hop beats adding little to the dominant Arabic, gypsy and Hebrew strains; pleasant, but hardly ground-breaking stuff. But I've grown to particularly enjoy the more reggae-inflected tracks, such as the sardonic "A Tale of Woe", and "Ten Eleven", on which the blind Algerian rapper Mohammed chats up a storm, and where Albarn chips in his two pennyworth, too. The overall theme of the album is the need for cultural empathy, a belief borne out in the coming-together of singers from diverse backgrounds, their various contributions rendering the lyric booklet a typesetter's nightmare of different alphabets. But while there are some exquisite individual moments here - Herinderpal Panesar's beautiful dhol flute solo in the title-track, and the dashing klezmer clarinet break in "This and That"- the accumulated weight of Terry Hall's glumness casts its own pall over the proceedings, when a more positive celebration of diversity might have been more appropriate. Any gloomier, and he'd be heading the way of Killing Joke's Jaz Coleman.