I was fortunate enough to be played a promotional copy of this album last week and I was surprised. I have been listening to Tom McRae since Just Like Blood and always enjoyed his acute sense of how to turn a phrase and construct a beautiful melody but I felt that he had wandered away from his strengths on King of Cards, as if he was wearing a suit that just didn't fit him.
Alphabet of Hurricanes is I think his best work since Just Like Blood, and a close relation to his debut, with it's stark lyrics and bare sound, which occasionally gives way to huge swells of accompanying instruments. It is by far his most intimate album, recorded in his flat and noticeably devoid of the decorative frills of Just Like Blood or the jarring attempts to be overtly mainstream on King of Cards. It actually reminded me of the folk touchstone, Pink Moon. It is a very different record to that, but like that the bareness and poetic honesty is breathtaking.
Tom has a very unique sounding album here and it will perhaps in time be my favourite after a year of listening. More than anything this album sounds like a man who has learnt who he is, where he belongs and the sound of someone loves what he is doing. I hope it gets him the kind of attention he richly deserves, but I fear it is too intimate and private for a mainstream audience. I do not think that is a bad thing.
I strongly recommend it.