Dead Men Tell No Tales

Dead Men Tell No Tales takes a stripped-down turn with plaintive lyrical confessions as pretty as they are prescient, summoning Syd Barrett's wild spirit through a séance of simple reverb burbles and acoustic incantations. Frontand-center vocals recounting love, loss and death's lurking presence are presented against airy guitar shimmer in a demented yin and yang seemingly forecasting the scarf swathed, underground dandy man's abrupt fall nearly 20 years later. In the midst of such weighty tomes are less downtrodden peeks into the studio, where Sudden and his Jacobites are caught on tape in a few joyful fits and starts, adding another complex layer to this celebrated post-punk.