The Independent-The Tide Has Changed (World Village)

Reviewed by Phil Johnson

Sunday, 3 October 2010

 
    

With an artist as fecund as Atzmon you learn that some you win, some you lose.

Following the excellent In Loving Memory of America (and preceding a new collaboration with Robert Wyatt), this celebration of his band's 10th birthday returns to familiar Middle Eastern modes and lugubrious sax solos. It also rather uncomfortably mixes the genuinely sublime (sad ballads such as "And So Have We", "We Lament") with the ridiculous, most notably in the Shuttleworth-meets-Brecht vibe of the opener and closer.