When Grace Jones was asked at this year’s Q Awards what it felt like to be named a Q Idol by the music magazine, she gave an unexpected answer. “Being from a biblical family, I should not be accepting an Idol award,” she mused. Very few contemporary musicians in the age of Simon Cowell would be aware that idolatry used to be considered a bad thing. But Jones is not a contemporary musician. She’s a 60-year-old singer who hasn’t made an album in almost two decades (actually, she has made two, but nobody wanted to release them). Until she appeared at Massive Attack’s Meltdown, she was a “Whatever happened to?” curiosity. So, what were the odds of her comeback album being any good? What, for that matter, were the odds of Jones — who used to ask us to pull up to her bumper, or some such innuendo — being from a biblical family? Who knew? In fact, we find out far more about Jones on Hurricane than from her previous incarnations as disco queen and chat-show oddity. Songs such as Williams’ Blood and I’m Crying (Mother’s Tears) contain touching memories of childhood (“Treating my cuts with her home remedies”) and offer us depth beneath the surface image (“This is my voice,” the album begins, “my weapon of choice”). Couple this more substantial approach to lyric-writing with a sound that sticks to the strengths of her early-1980s heyday and Hurricane may well be Jones’s best album.

Wall of Sound WOS050CD

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