The Glare (2009)

Nyman and band were joined by singer David McAlmont to perform their inspired The Glare album. Magically sung, impeccably played, the collaboration was...absorbing.

What a wonderful trip through Nyman’s Land – a wonderland of mesmeric music.
Into a rigid landscape he injects lyric drama – of haunting repetition and hypnotic harmony. Think Bach. Think Dexy’s Midnight Runners (without the vocals – they’ll come later).
McAlmont has trawled through the Nyman back catalogue and the world’s media to produce soulful stories in a voice soaring to a fabulous falsetto and dropping to a whisper. Perfect pitch, perfect diction. So poignant and so powerful.
He sings of captured Somali pirates and drug runners, adventurers and the lovely Joanna Lumley. Best of all, the title track relates the ugly saga of Susan Boyle, and her narrow survival of torture by television.
Blissful and blistering.

... The Glare showed Nyman to be a much more versatile composer and arranger than he is often taken to be. Anybody who associates his work with wearisome repetitive motifs, hammered out with pointlessly manic intensity, will be pleasantly astonished by the variety and subtlety of the music here.