TIM BOOTH : BONE
One of The Three's world exclusive first review of the album
Some people will tell you that you can tell a lot about an album simply by its cover. The artwork for Bone comes across as fun and improvised, featuring old pictures of Tim and friends, paintings by Lee "Muddy" Baker and Tim's partner Kate, handwritten lyrics and a dedication to home, love and family. The theme runs through the album, this is a fun record, made not through commercial necessity but what seems to be a desire from Tim, Lee and KK to make a record that they want to listen to and present it to the world. This is presented as Tim Booth's debut solo album but it's more than that - it's a three-pronged collaboration.
Opening track "Wave Hello" sets the tone for the album. Solo albums from successful frontmen tend to focus on the singer with the tunes almost an irrelevance. Bone is an exception. Tim doesn't appear until almost a minute in by which time the musical background to the album has been established with a fraught, unsettling keyboard and guitar intro. The album credits Lee as playing keyboards (badly), but intentionally or not, it works extremely well. In fact the musical backing to the whole album is a bit mysterious - it sounds underproduced (which is a good thing) but there's some stunning tricks dotted around. On the opening track, the guitar almost appears to answer Tim's "wave hello" of the chorus.
"Wave Hello" is a love song, imbued in the verse with the doubt that characterised some of Tim's greatest lyrical moments "somedays it feels like I will never find land, just spin around the wheel". The only real disappointment to it is that it finishes rather abruptly, fading out after about three and a half minutes, when another minute or so of Tim improvising over an improvised backing would have worked so well. As "Wave Hello" may be a single, we can hope that they go back and produce an "extended" studio version for one of the formats