Don McGlashan: Warm Hand

Herald rating: * * * *

Don McGlashan's first album under his own name arrives at a time he's got a top ten hit under somebody else's. From his soundtrack to the film No 2, Bathe In the River sung by Hollie Smith, is McGlashan's first blip on the pop radar since the Mutton Birds quietly called it a day at the turn of the century, having given it a good go across four studio albums here and Up Over.

The band was a major chapter in McGlashan's musical life. But they were one of many which have stretched back to Blam Blam Blam - surely the duxes of our post-punk Class of 81 - through the performance troupe the Front Lawn, to soundtracks and occasional dabbles in the world of art music.

Yes, he's been many things in his 25-year career, and pulled off a creative rebirth every time. So it is on Warm Hand, an engaging if slightly underfed album which reminds that not only is McGlashan among our finest songwriters, he's our greatest musical storyteller.

It's his narrative songs of people and places - supported by his tunesmith's ear and sympathetic players - that have always resonated.

He's made art of the pop song as an out-of-body experience, his characters (often reprehensible) and landscapes (often recognisable) drawn in a few vivid strokes.

As the Mutton Birds years progressed, fewer of McGlashan's songs seemed to come with a good yarn to them. Here though, they're in the majority, which makes for an album that unfolds like a mishmash of short stories as it swings from New York to the backblocks of New Zealand to 19th-century Tahiti.

If anything it's over too soon - its 52 minutes consists of 10 tracks, including a musical interlude. That's right before album highlight Miracle Sun, a quietly majestic song set against the summer of Opo the dolphin. Like the rest of the tracks, it's big on atmosphere, strings and musically open-ended.

But a hoped-for reprise of its glorious chorus never comes - interestingly, there's also a radio edit of the song which could turnit into the classic anthem it's clearly fighting the temptation to be.

There are songs which hark back to the Mutton Birds years - homesick opener This Is London and Harbour Bridge which puts another pin in the map of McGlashan's Auckland with yet another song of airports and goodbyes.

And again McGlashan captures the latent menace of the New Zealand countryside (caught before in the Blams' Call For Help and the Mutton Birds' White Valiant) on Passenger 26 with its tourist bus driver giving one of his fares a true Kiwi Experience.

Elsewhere there's also a Big Apple PR guy rationalising his involvement in a Third World tragedy on a song (Toy Factory Fire) that evokes the politics of Naomi Klein's No Logo; a drug trafficker (Courier) and one of the Bounty crew saying goodbye to paradise (Queen of the Night).

There is just one reflective first-person ballad - I Will Not Let You Down, although it's written by studio collaborator Sean "SJD" Donnelly who adds harmonies to the song which will make a beautiful bookend to McGlashan's Anchor Me. But even with moments like that, and all its tales well told, Warm Hand feels like a transitional kind of set. Long-term followers will be riveted, but it still feels like the definitive Don McGlashan solo album is at least another chapter away.

Label: Arch Hill