Baht OTM ('on the money') as usual.
I like it very much. not a necessary item by all means, but a nice reminder under a different light of a powerful album, with or without the vocals.
actually, what
Wandermude puts in relief for me is there's really nothing so much 'shockingly new' or 'controversially difficult' about
Blemish - it's simply as if he'd merged whatever song album of his with
Plight & Premonition or
Approaching Silence; you can sense an urgency and lack of polish that has not been there before, but otherwise I really can't hear what's so forbidding there that he hasn't tackled before (e.g. in 'Pop Song', 'Gone to Earth', or even the guitar outbursts in 'Godman', etc etc). anyway, with
Wandermude, it's nice to have the attention refocused on Sylvian's musicianly skills from the customary vocal ones for a change.
as far as its textures and atmospheres go, I find
Blemish a very colourful, even open-air album (as opposed to its lyrics). somehow it reminds me of a lot of Robert Wyatt's music, and of this 2002 Italian album, produced by Hector Zazou:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBD63CwtMrw