Momus - Issyvoo (2022)

Many years ago Momus wrote a song called The Homosexual about a man who isn't actually gay but delights in — and profits from — the fact that people think he is. Themes of sexual orientation and gender identity thrust and cluster through this, his latest album, recorded in Berlin and named after the writer Christopher Isherwood… or, rather, the way Isherwood's Berlin landlady mispronounced his name when, with the poet Auden and other sexual exiles, he lived amongst queers and cabaret singers during the dying days of the Weimar Republic, teetering at the eerie brink of Nazism. It would be nice to think that, a century later, we'd moved on. Fascism, alas, still menaces us just as it menaced Mr Issyvoo, limiting our personal choices with nannying safetyism or outright dictatorship. Other themes churn through this playful yet serious record: guilt in the art world, the primitivist fantasies of expressionist painters, Britain's semi-feudal monarchy, the laughter of lawyers, the lonely battles of social media, the prettiness of monkeys and the splishy-splashiness of joy. The music this time is hooky and poppy. If we really are sauntering into a "pocket apocalypse" here's a wonderful way to whistle some of its big issues.