Barry Guy's arresting epic, The Blue Shroud, draws its inspiration from a polemical curtain closer, a censoring veil thrown over Picasso's pacifying mural Guernica in 2003. Bush's bozos were feeling the pinch down at the UN Security Council while pitching their invasion of Iraq so decided to cloak any embarrassing history lessons that happened to be hanging about. The music itself is as intimidating as the artwork that inspired it, a complex intermeshing of international talents that resurrects the Spanish painter's message with gnarly atonalism chased down with vocalist Savina Yannatou's banshee-like wailing. The Greek singer's throaty ululations come over like Dagmar Krause at her most impassioned, seemingly wringing the very ink from Irish poet Kerry Hardie's specifically-written text, like a tourniquet tugged-tight across pulsing blood-starved arteries.

The Blue Shroud, like Guernica, harnesses chaos to ferment inescapable feelings of foreboding, but like the ‘inconvenient masterpiece’ it also offers a hopeful postscript, as baroque guitar passages and bucolic arcos fall in for the original painting's enigmatic symbolism, conveying redemption like a peace-loving dove.