In a climate that's obsessed with rediscovering the post punk roots of contemporary music, it's surprising Terry Hall's latest record hasn't attracted more attention.
Hall can of course claim his position amongst the best of those who laid the pathway to today's club music and helped to plot the route out of the confines of rock to a more global music.
Perhaps the less than deafening response is because there's a predictability about the dominant influences on 'The Hour Of Two Lights', with Hall trading in his end-of-the-Seventies interest in all things Caribbean for heavily Arabic influenced drums and instrumentation.
But while Hall is by no means the first Western musician to tread this Eastern path, there is something welcomingly fresh and un-laboured about this album.
For a start it does Hall no harm that this is a collaboration with Mushtaq - former member of the much-underrated Fun-Da-Mental.
With his involvement the beats we get on tracks such as 'A Gathering Storm', the excellent 'The Silent Wail' and extraordinary 'They Gotta Quit Kicking My Dog Around', positively kick their way out of the speakers.
Apart from Mushtaq, the album features a host of other collaborations with Tunisian, Egyptian, Lebanese and Hebrew vocalists, an Algerian-French rapper, a troupe of Polish gypsies and, of course, Damon Albarn himself.
Proof, if needed, that Fun Da Mental were more than the social conscience of UK hip hop and Hall was always more than a pretty face with a spikey hair do.
