Tom Jones: Spirit in the Room – review

Full marks for nerve to Tom Jones for opening his second successive album of stripped-down gravitas rock with Leonard Cohen's Tower of Song , transformed from hotel-bar funk into a finger-picked country blues. Cohen's version is a mordant, blackly comic meditation, but Jones can't play lines about "born with the gift of a golden voice" for laughs and so he turns it, unexpectedly and triumphantly, into a eulogy for a life in music. It's also the highlight of this collection mixing covers of rock-aristo songwriters, a couple of well-regarded cults and a sprinkling of blues, soul and gospel. It's never as rollicking as 2010's Praise and Blame , though a version of Tom Waits' Bad As Me will sound agreeably demented to anyone who's never heard the original . Odetta's Hit or Miss answers its own question, sadly, in its transition to country-pop. Most intriguing of all is the closing version of the Low Anthem's spectral Charlie Darwin , into which a full choir is inserted, as if to compensate in big dollops for the fact that doing "spectral" has never been among Jones's noted virtues.