Album review: Man gone missing: Burn you

AS IF A wandering ghost from the Mississippi Delta had strayed into a Tayside kirk, Man Gone Missing, aka Edinburgh-based blues singer-songwriter and slide-guitarist Simon Currie, took his resonator guitar into the unlikely-sounding venue of All Souls Church, Invergowrie, accompanied by harmonica-player Drew Lynch.

Currie's plangent upper-register crooning, the shimmer and whine of his spare guitar accompaniments, along with the echoing church space, generate a high and lonesome melancholy.

Some of the songs are a little samey and the words can be unintelligible amid the echoes, but there are gripping moments: the hypnotically chiming guitar and mewling blues harp behind Relief, just a hint of plainchant echoes over the brooding stealth of the guitar in the title track and Currie's poignant keening in unison with slide guitar in the closing Silence. The effect is pared-down, raw and haunting, with an undoubted whiff of classic blues.