Tom Jones turned 70 last month, even his famously dark and fulsome head of hair has finally ceded to the inexorable passing of time, but the voice is as luxuriant and colourful as ever. That's not a gratuitous hair reference either, it appears significant, because on Praise & Blame the Welsh pop legend seems at long last to be acting his age. After playing the pop world's equivalent of your wedding-dancing grandad for too long, Jones has adopted a new, sophisticated gospel and blues style on this record, picking up comparisons all over the place to Johnny Cash's final albums.It's a dramatic change of direction for Jones, after years of shaking his hips and belting out pop tunes, he's stripped all that away to reveal the raw singing talent that we all knew he had. It is undoubtedly a good move, it's just a shame it didn't happen a decade ago, depriving us of years of material as good as this in favour of albums like Reload was frankly criminal.
