I’m pretty sure James Allsopp would strenuously deny any conscious influence, but parts of this second album by his trio and compositional vehicle, The Golden Age of Steam, sound uncannily like the National Health part of the Canterbury spectrum. That's partly due to Kit Downes’ Hammond organ (the same sound that makes Downes’ other trio, Troyka, sound like Canterbury scene trio Egg) but it's largely down to Allsopp's writing. Fusing weird time signatures and hiccupping riffs, his compositions manage to feel clever and irreverent while sitting just the right side of smart-arsery. If the term ‘Lynchian’ is becoming a clichéfor a skewed, vaguely unsettling atmosphere, then these tunes deserve the epithet better than most: tracks like ‘Butter Dome’, with its phlegmatic spoken intro by Andrew Plummer, conjure a sense of menacing uncertainty that belies Allsopp's tight compositional control. A concept album based loosely around some kind of sinister nightmare circus, it's probably best avoided by anyone with a phobia of clowns and/or bookish prog.