As often as this gets written about, almost yearly now in the music press, the album’s guitarist and producer Ray Russell rarely gets the attention he deserves. Sort of an English version of Sonny Sharrock, Russell is an expressive monster equally happy with freewheeling scrabble and straight jazz comping. Fay is a songwriter who made two albums for Decca (this, and the debut before it) before being dropped and retiring to live a quiet family life. His vibe is equal parts Cohen and Dylan, in thrall here to that vaguely Biblical syntax that both the Canadian and the American adopted in their blends. (“Shall” was big in the Seventies, as a word in songs, and it was their fault.) Fay is an unpretentious singer and a grim lyricist, and this album feels like an Aretha record ghostwritten by a very sad Englishman with an weirdly American accent and a couple of bursts of King Crimson-y prog. Really great.