Barry Adamson couldn’t have picked a better song to open his new album, Back to the Cat. The smoky horns, strutting bass line, and lazy piano figures leave us with no doubt as to where we are—in some shady, smoke-filled bar on the edge of town—and when Adamson starts singing, we learn everything we need to know about our narrator. He “woke up this morning with a crazy dream” that the “Earth was a burning ball of fire,” and from there it isn’t long before the Devil and his demons enter the story. By the time the story ends, our guide through the twilit netherworld is rattling off a laundry list of freaks and losers and outcasts—the cast of characters we’re to meet along the way—and he ends the song with an ominous growl: “And now I’m going down.” But is it a final farewell, or an invitation to follow?

That, of course, depends on how brave of a listener you care to be. Adamson is nothing if not dramatic, and opening his album this way is intentional—it’s the sound of the door opening just a crack, barely enough for us to peek into the album and see what awaits us in the remaining songs. And it isn’t exactly frivolous fare—it’s an album strewn with broken hearts and shattered dreams, crowded with junkies and drunkards and whores—but as dark as it may sound on paper, it’s a total delight on record.

Adamson—formerly the bass player for Magazine, then one of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds—sounds like he’s drinking from the same creative well as Tom Waits. In fact, it sounds like he’s hanging out in the same seedy bars; Back to the Cat comes as close as anything can get to capturing the same spirit of early Waits classics like Small Change and The Heart of Saturday Night. But where Waits draws his inspiration from American blues, post-rock experimentalism, and vaudeville, Adamson’s music is a different animal altogether. He is, first and foremost, a composer, and his albums all sound like soundtracks to films that haven’t been made yet (and would probably be impossibly weird if they were). His music is grandly theatrical, even delightfully, intentionally campy sometimes—Adamson is clearly playing a persona here, and his music is doubtless inspired as much by film noir and spy movie soundtracks as much as anything. But there’s also some sultry jazz, sleazy lounge, rollicking rock and roll, pop, funk, and even—perversely!—some gospel. It’s a gritty and greasy brew of piano and organ, electric guitar, and Enrico Mancini horns.

And it all works amazingly well. The music of Back to the Cat is alluringly dark, thick and full, cinematic in all the right ways. Indeed, there are two dynamite instrumental numbers here that feel just as crucial to the fabric of the record as any of the other tracks, and Adamson has sequenced his songs in such a way that it feels like a story gradually unfolding; if “The Beaten Side of Town” sets the stage and introduces the cast of characters, “Straight ‘Til Sunrise” and the Elvis-style rockabilly “Spend a Little Time” let us get to know them a little better; “I Could Love You” slows things down for a soulful, organ-drenched jukebox number that brings some tenderness and emotion into the mix, while late-album tracks like the horn-laden gospel raver “Civilization” and the somber pop ballad “People” feel like crescendos, epiphanies, and album closer “Psycho Sexual” is appropriately epic, a druggy summary of everything that’s come before it.

But is it worth it, spending so much time in Adamson’s shady bar? Sure it is. Theatrical though he may be, he’s no sensationalist, and the point of these songs is not to shock us with how sleazy they can be; on the contrary, though the music is certainly greasy and dark, Adamson’s songs are teeming with humor and compassion, brimming with humanity, finding wisdom and beauty even amidst the profane. Plus, the album is just flat-out delightful. Adamson combines styles and influences into an imaginative and evocative whole that is stirring as well as spooky, illuminating and mysterious at the same time, and vivid enough that, for this particular soundtrack, no accompanying film is necessary. Adamson’s achievement here is deeply impressive, and the album is a dark and irresistible gem for any listener courageous enough to give it a try.

Barry Adamson was a founding member both of the seminal art-punk band Magazine and of Nick Cave’s ragtag gang of Bad Seeds, but he might be best known for composing the soundtrack for David Lynch’s film Lost Highway. And that’s just the beginning of his soundtrack work; throughout his solo career, Adamson has returned to writing and recording soundtracks again and again, following a musical muse that is undeniably cinematic both in style and in scope. In fact, if you were to ask Adamson, he’d likely tell you that every record he’s ever made is a soundtrack– even if most of them don’t actually have movies to go with them.

I’m not sure who invented the “soundtrack in search of a film” aesthetic. The idea is bandied around quite a bit in music circles, and Adamson is the man most frequently credited with dreaming it up. Some musical historians might disagree with that, but regardless: Adamson knows how to write a killer soundtrack album, music so evocative and grandiose that it feels like, well, a movie, shown in glorious Technicolor.

His latest such soundtrack, Back to the Cat, doesn’t have a corresponding movie. And maybe that’s for the best. Listening to the album, one imagines that its film equivalent would be weird beyond words, dark and gritty and more than a little surreal. There aren’t many filmmakers who could possibly come up with a film that could hold its own against Adamson’s quirky imagination, so maybe it’s best that the album stands on its own, as a soundtrack to Adamson’s own twisted dreams and glorious obsessions.

But if there’s no picture to accompany it, you might ask, then what exactly makes it a soundtrack? It’s not that the music tells a story per se, although there is certainly a strong narrative thrust to it. It’s not that there are any sweeping flourishes of strings or brass; it’s a much greasier, gaudier piece of music than that. And it’s not that it’s an instrumental work where the listener has to provide his or her own story; actually, only two of its ten tracks are wordless.

Still, the medium is unmistakable: This is a soundtrack through and through, made by a man who’s haunted, bewtiched by the very concept of the soundtrack. And he explores that obsession with bizarrely compelling results, filling the album with musical references, a pastiche of familiar styles and sounds, and archetypal characters in such a way that he creates and then subverts his own weird mythology. You don’t need the booming voice of a narrator to tell you what the setting is, or who the characters are– the music, and Adamson’s carefully-chosen words, tell you everything you need to know.

Make no mistake: The journey Adamson invites you on is a dark and a strange one, but it’s also endlessly seductive. It’s seedier than a Tom Waits album and more noir than The Maltese Falcon, with a musical vocabulary that’s fluent in the campiest styles and influences you can imagine– lounge crooning, Elvis-style rockabilly, acid-jazz, Burt Bacharach, Scott Walker, Isaac Hays, and, of course, all the craziest film scores you’ve ever heard. Adamson treats all these styles and influences as equal, drawing equally from all of them and blurring the lines of where one ends and the other begins, using the connotations and implied meanings of each genre to tell his story and create not just a musical landscape, but an entire world. Or at least its seedy underbelly.

If there were to be a movie based on this record, you can bet it wouldn’t be the feel-good hit of the summer. These songs are full of addicts and murderers and jilted lovers and junkies and whores– all residents of “The Beaten Side of Town,” he tells us on the first song. These are the kinds of folks you’d expect to find hanging around at 2 in the morning at Tom Waits’ mystical bar. Dark is the word to describe it, but dark doesn’t always mean dispiriting or depressing, especially not when you’re talking about a writer with such a vivid imagination and such a firm grip on gallows humor. These songs might make you laugh, and, when you least expect it, they might even knock you upside the head with a surprising burst of compassion.

Indeed, even as Adamson sings about a world ruled by Satan and his minions, where death lies in wait behind every closed door, it’s hard not to think there’s something oddly redemptive here– or at least, something strongly moral. Maybe it’s as simple as the fact that he’s taken such dubious pieces of sound and story and stitched them together into a truly masterly, beautiful, endlessly creative piece of music, one in which style and substance are one and the same. I’m still not sure if this is the best album I’ve heard this year or not, but it’s up there, and it’s a must for any listener with a sense of adventure– and of humor.

Even P-Fork likes it.

I may be talking to myself here, but this album is so special that I just have to keep harping on it. I wrote this for my blog:

Barry Adamson begins his new album, Back to the Cat, with a dream– a feverish, apocalyptic fantasy about “The Beaten Side of Town.” It’s either nightmarish or utterly euphoric– or perhaps a little of both– depending on your perspective. In it, our shady narrator emerges from the shadows and recalls a vision he had of a giant temple, with a steeple spire and a sign that bids welcome, in no uncertain terms, to anyone and everyone: Junkies and liquorheads, lowlifes and deadbeats, addicts and hustlers. We’ve even told that agnostics are on the list.

As Adamson lays down his litany of the broken and the downtrodden, the freaks and the thugs and the addicts, he sets the tone for what the album is all about. It’s about people, in all their brokenness and ugliness and need. So for the next several songs, Adamson catalogs a strange and bewildering assortment of nocturnal citydwellers, inhabitants of the beaten side of town, all of them messed up and all of them ultimately beautiful. Adamson, whose modus operandi has always been to craft soundtracks in search of films, is a remarkably sophisticated guy, painting in broad strokes with mythological and cultural archetypes– the kinds of characters we’ve all seen and heard a million times before, they’re so ingrained in our humanity– and then fills them in with hid devilish humor, his poet’s eye for detail, and his odd mix of cynicism and compassion. He gives us jilted lovers, men on the lam, characters desperate to escape from their past, and perhaps their present as well.

But he really clinches it on the next-to-last-song, a song that’s titled– appropriately enough– “People.” Amid the flurry of images and ideas that Adamson packs together, this tune is so simple that it feels almost confessional in nature. And it’s here that he unlocks the door of what the album is all about: “People, they are dumb/ And it’s come to my attention/ That I am one.” And there, with that line, Adamson places himself on the same plain previously inhabited only by Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Joe Henry, and maybe Leonard Cohen, a place where humanity is seen in all of its messiness and depravity, its addiction and its need– and then afforded a measure of dignity and compassion, as the singer and listener both identify themselves among the beautiful and damned.

That’s a big part of Adamson’s gift– his ability to peer into the shadows and back alleys of our civilization and find things that truly alarm and dismay, but also things that remind us of our shared humanity and of the strange beauty therein. The fact that his lyrical sophistication is matched– even exceeded– by his musical sophistication, as he brings together elements of jazz noir, James Bond soundtracks, Elvis-loving rock and roll, acid funk, gospel, and lounge crooning, is all the more reason why Back to the Cat isn’t just one of the year’s finest records– it’s downright essential.