Dave Cloud & the Gospel of Power - Practice in the Milky Way

There can be few records that manage to include tributes to the English female, nudist camps, runnin' for the border, and French writer and WWII resistance agitator Guy de Maupassant... but then again there are few artists quite like Dave Cloud. "Have no fear because this is David Cloud delivering to you the story of Siberian hypnotism", begins his latest 20-track opus, Practice in the Milky Way, "yes and includes a variety of sounds". It's never entirely clear what this impressively side-burned and portly singer, sometime frontman of the Gospel Of Power, really intends in his garrulous, gnarly narrated Nashville Blues: his tongue's in cheek, but it's rarely his own. As he announces on the title track: "good loving can be found... on the rebound".