Gavin Friday - Ecce Homo

13 years have passed since Gavin Friday's last album and he returns with Ecce Homo an album that is bold, defiant but also reflective in dealing with loss and looking back to childhood. Borne from spontaneous sessions with Dave Ball, following an approach from the Soft Cell man to work on a cover of Suicide's 'Ghostrider' as part of a series of Blast First Petite EPs celebrating Alan Vega's 70th birthday. Over the years and countless sessions the album came together, until Friday took it to Michael Heffernan his Dublin based producer to mix and add string arrangements to Dave Ball and Riccardo Mulhall's beats and rhythms. Ecce Homo is an album about life, loss and love from the vantage point of someone with over 6 decades of living. He's still angry at the Catholic Church but it's a touchstone and not the overriding theme. Current events have him fired up like never before, and following the more sedate and reflective Catholic album, Ecce Homo pulses and throbs to beats like never before.

Ecce Homo opens gently enough to piano, clarinet and the orchestral arrangements of 'Lovesubzero' with Gavin Friday offering a proclamation of love for his partner before it bursts into pumping electro, his voice low and shadowed with female vocals, as it slips between orchestral splendour and thumping beats rising further into a delirious rasp riddled with distortion, with the title repeated in an approach closely resembling Underworld. The throbbing electro beats continue onto 'Ecce Homo' with Friday assured and defiant tackling head on these troubled and turbulent times in a world where tolerance and compassion is being lost. "Fight fire with fire, we can walk on water" he wills over darting beats, in lyrics filled with apocalyptic and biblical imagery, reflected in the soaring operatic voices. The anger here is more questioning with hope at its core.

Gavin Friday has always pushed boundaries. As a Virgin Prune he would become known for wearing dresses - made by his mother - and on 'The Church of Love', encased in eighties electro and synths, he sings of acceptance and of how "we pray in our own way". Naturally there are lyrical criticisms fired at Catholicism, but this is just as much about the younger generations creating their own identities. A celebration of love, free of all guilt and "shame, shame, shame", as he says.

It slows down down for 'Stations of the Cross' a song dedicated to and originally planned for Sinead O'Connor to sing. Here in hushed almost reverential tones he's no less angry swiping digs at the Catholic church for its continual crimes. The austere backing of electronics is made even more sombre with tolling bells and a weeping orchestral score. "Do ya wanna, do ya wanna see the buildings dance?" he asks in low gruff tones on 'Lady Esquire' channelling the Berlin era period of Iggy and Bowie and the seventies hits of, um, Gary Glitter. It's a tale of teenage initiation and transgression telling of a formative drug experience opening minds, asserting identity as a means of escape from parental control (now I'm not my father's son) over gritty glam electronic rhythms and lyrics referencing his teenage years of Bowie albums, and the impending formation of the Virgin Prunes, before slipping out on clarinet recalling snatches of the sort of abuse once thrown at them.

It's no wonder he's in a reflective mood. Ecce Homo was recorded over an extended period during which Gavin Friday lost his mother and many friends including the music producer Hal Willner with whom he worked extensively on countless projects, and naturally that loss seeps into the album where a run of tracks offer a welcome interlude removed from the energetic dance rhythms.

'When The World Was Young' is an electro ballad, opening with acoustic guitars and swollen with lush strings, filled with childhood memories - it's dedicated to Bono and Guggi. It's a song borne of experience and shaped by the innocence of youth: "we walked in the world, we reached for the sky". It speaks of a fearlessness and the wonder of what that gang of boys from Lypton Village would go onto achieve. 'The Best Boys In Dublin' which follows also focusses on best friends. This time, though it's a touching tender tribute to his pet dachshund dogs, Stan and Ralf - who died not long before the album was completed. Couched in acoustic guitars and strewn with lush, filmic string arrangements the sense of loss if unmissable. 'Lamento', a gentle ballad bathed in piano and acoustic strum and chime, which closes the vinyl edition, also reflects on unending love and of grief. Friday is emotive and sombre here, accompanied with an alluring female voice, wrestling with hurt and deceit and a cracked, broken heart that lives on. It also acts as a tribute to his mother with a melodrama heightened by the majestic swelling of strings, drum rolls and operatic voices.

His swagger returns on the nostalgic 'Cabarotica', a great piece of sultry electro pop paying homage to Soho where he reminisces about a hedonistic trip to hell's hundred acres in 1982 carrying nods to Bowie and Virgin Prunes album, with passages mourning the loss of heart and soul of the streets where the great diviners did tread. More Virgin Prunes references paraphrasing lyrics from 'Baby Turns Blue' surface on the refrain of the gritty, textured electro of 'Daze' a track wrestling with the psychological effects of modern social conflicts but it's 'Amaranthus (Love Lies Bleeding)' that cuts deep. Pulsing to hyper electro beats and wiry guitar 'Amaranthus (Love Lies Bleeding)' masks an unsettling aspect as Friday flitting between a sneer and assured tones confronts the passing of his mother due to the debilitating effect of dementia. There's little comfort and closure to be found here, the grief displayed is raw and unflinching: "Your bad brains and broken bones, The lights are on, no one's home". And when it closes to the strains of 'Daisy Bell' and his mothers voice appears with birthday wishes for Fionan it's just heartbreaking.

It's been worth the wait. Ecce Homo is expansive, vital and dynamic, and whether he is raging over electro beats or reflective on the ballads - he's always had a thing for chanson - which are bleak and deeply intimate despite their beautiful arrangements Ecce Homo sees Gavin Friday peering into the darkness, with a gentle tenderness and questioning anger finding only hope and redemption. I can't wait for the live performances. Ecce Homo is released on blue vinyl and as an expanded deluxe CD edition with bonus material. Vinyl, CD and bundles are available from the Gavin Friday store