Album Review: Allbarone by Baxter Dury

It's not often you'll hear of an artist making the best work of their career by their eighth album. However, with Baxter Dury, this couldn't be truer. Allbarone's dancier feel excels due to producer Paul Epworth's (Adele, Florence + the Machine) touches in the studio. A fortuitous meeting at Glastonbury last year brought the pair together, and their partnership here results in Dury pushing himself to go against the sonic familiarity of his more typically minimal approaches.

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Regardless of the order the words are arranged, they fail to capture the strange alchemy that renders the base elements for Allbarone into such a deeply satisfying, simultaneously deeply daft and strangely profound cross-pollination of belly-laughs and tear-stained tragedy. Allbarone's foundations are in a chance encounter between Dury and in-demand A-list producer Paul Epworth (Adele, Bloc Party, Paul McCartney, U2 etc.) at Glastonbury. Some of the fruits of the collaboration sweettalk the rubbery funk of 2023's career-best I Thought I Was Better Than You, passed the foreboding bouncers into a woozy exclusive rave.

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His fifth album Prince Of Tears was rightfully hailed as a lovelorn, unvarnished masterpiece when it was released in 2017, and since then we've been treated to one hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking memoir from Baxter Dury: unreliable narrator (Chaise Longue) and two albums that slipped under the radar (The Night Chancers and I Thought I Was Better Than You). Allbarone sees Dury bouncing back (and taking to a gondola in the video of the title track) with his most compelling album in almost a decade. Laying bare his sardonic, iniquitous soul on the hilariously bitter Schadenfreude, his biting sprechgesang is a match made in proverbial heaven with Chiswick-based super-producer Paul Epworth, providing propulsive electronic soundbeds.

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