Al Park: Monkey (digital outlets)

Five years ago a CD turned up in Elsewhere's letterbox and we didn't know what to make of it. It was Better Already and was the songs of someone named Al Park – not known to us – presented by the likes of Delaney Davidson, Anita Clark (aka Motte), Jordan Luck, Marlon Williams, Barry Saunders and others.

The album moved from the stereo to a shelf, then to another more distant shelf and after a little while it was too late to do anything about it.

What we know now is that Al Park has been a mainstay in local bands around Christchurch for decades, has run venues and worked at Echo Records.

He is what they once would call a regional breakout, except he never really broke out of his region.

A local hero who reputation did not travel far and wide, despite the best efforts of those worthy souls on Better Already.

Park's haphazard music career embraced punk, soul, folk and rock, and this new album of nine originals – old, recent or new we don't know – opens with the Northern Soul stomper All the Love I Have, the good-time shuffle of Gonna Have a Party and then excavates a hitherto unreleased song Get Vandalised by his late 1970s punk rock band the Vandals.

Elsewhere the album – its full title being One For The Dog, One For The Cat and One For The People With A Monkey On Their Back – makes a virtue of Park's tarnished vocals on the backporch laziness of Don't Be Shy and in the cracked late-period Dylan/Willie Nelson emotions of Don't Tell Me Your Story. The eight minute-plus Signpost is a mythic, Dylanesque narrative.

The best are two weary and reflective songs; the cigarettes'n'whisky ballad Careless Love and especially the intimate Twilight Hour which, in the keyboard backdrop from Adam Hattaway, taps the downbeat street soul mood of Southside Johnny and Springsteen ballads: “My dreams have changed, I'm in the twilight hour”.

Or maybe his hour has come.

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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here