Easy Money

Four years on from his intriguing Domestic Eccentric collection, the Canadian singer-songwriter, born Christopher Luedecke, is not only more domestic – grappling with middle-aged parenting and ‘Dad Jokes’ while still dreaming of ‘Easy Money’ – but also he sounds more eccentric (calypso rhythms in frosty Nova Scotia).

The jocularity of proceedings early on gives way to a far darker tone at the mid-point of a CD that actually in effect has a Side A and Side B. As such a Jimmy Buffett-esque ode to the excellence of ‘sardines that come in a little can’ leads into ‘Death of Truth’, a rueful, Leonard Cohen-inspired memorial to Luedecke's own old man, a news junkie who passed away the week before the inauguration of a US administration whose disdain for truth-telling would have terrified him. But it's not long before we're back from that particularly strange and worrying world to a more engaging and multi-hued global view, one where it actually seems to make an eccentric sort of sense for Luedecke to cover not exactly Dylan's apocalyptic ‘A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall’, but rather ‘Le Ciel Est Noir’, Greek singer Nana Mouskouri's French language adaptation.