Richard Youngs – Amplifying Host – Jagjaguwar – JAG199 - ****

Imagine Richard Youngs as the junior member of a cabal of prolific and puritanical English musician-mystics, including The Fall's Mark E Smith, Van der Graaf Generator's Peter Hammill, Martin Carthy and The Clangers' composer Vernon Elliot, and still his nature will elude you.
Youngs turns his hand once more, on what I think is genuinely his 136th album, to a threateningly exact folk minimalism, his wracked vocal astral projecting into a subspace void of tranquilised acoustic guitar arpeggios and truncated electric blues licks. Don't let Youngs be the kind of genius that's discovered after the event.
He's here, right now, and he's improving with age.

(20/9/11)