Matt Langley: As Real As You Want It To Be (digital outlets)

It has been many many years since we heard from singer-songwriter Matt Langley whose previous albums were praised far and wide (at Elsewhere, by Nick Bollinger, Simon Sweetman and others).

But eight years on from his acoustic album Winterdust, and from Japan where he now lives, Langley has been back in touch because . . . 

He has teamed up with his former collaborator/producer/bass Brett Stanton and with a small band – Paul Trigg on guitars, drummer James Richards, keyboard player Clint Meech, violinist Alex Vaatstra and trumpeter Chris Winter – recorded 10 new songs which confirm this one-time APRA Silver Scroll nominee hasn't lost his touch.

In fact, from the languid psychedelic sway of the jaded, Lennonesque opener Bruised Fruit (“please don't share your delusions with me, I don't care anymore”) to its companion piece Shut It Down at the end (“on my my black days there is no sun, I'm looking through a black onion”) this collection has a strange sense of downbeat unease (Disintegration) embedded in its dreamy pop.

In places we could be back in 1966 when benign drugs arrived and musicians – think Beatles, Moody Blues, Left Banke – had an intuitive feel for melody but brought it to drone pop (Waking Dream) or embellished pastoralism (Antidote).

But as he sings on A Design for the Rain, “the past is a page rewritten each day” and so here an older, wiser and somewhat more fatigued Langley shares a darker vision born of experience: “All of your love, all of the pain, it's finally sinking in” on Under the Skin.

Even at his most positive, as on mini-anthem Give Love a Go, Langley deals in bleak images to get his point across: “If the world's come to rest like a stone in your chest you oughta give love a go . . . before they start the fire and burn down the world they oughta give love a go . . .”

Matt Langley was one of our most thoughtful, articulate songwriters and although this collection errs towards the downbeat lyrically and in his delivery, its woozy psychedelic quality carries these songs and allows them to work at multiple levels of consciousness: down there and up there.

“This is a forest for the trees, it doesn't need you, it doesn't need me,” is – as the title says – as real as you want it to be.

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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here