The Night Chancers

Dury seems to have found a tone and groove that he's both relishing and flourishing in. [Apr 2020, p.27]

The Night Chancers is Dury’s most accomplished work, its self awareness and innate understanding of genre and language shows the songwriter to be in the prime of his creativity.

Like Jarvis Cocker during Pulp’s mid-’90s heyday or Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson more recently, Dury possesses a habitual knack for making every day mundane nonentities seem like the most enchanting creatures on the planet.

Even with each powerful stride forwards in his career, it never seems Baxter will quite escape the shadowing of his late father, Ian. Yet, perhaps it is this paternal context, this very partial eclipsing that leaves Baxter’s work with a great style of its own. After all, a light emanating from shade will always appear brighter than one already doused in daylight.

The Night Chancers is the kind of record that hits instantly thanks to its smooth and strangely comforting surfaces, then each subsequent listen takes it deeper as Dury's delivery and outlook become more and more embraceable. He's struggled to make his own way in the music world, free of his father's influence. It seems safe to say that records as good as this prove that Baxter has arrived with a voice and sound of his own.

Extremely moody yet highly groovy sixth album.

Dury carries it off. His phrasemaking and delivery is immaculate: he plays with accents, albeit within a limited palette, and you listen to The Night Chancers believing it to be a real world.

The Night Chancers tackles big themes within tight restrictions – namely, masculinity at the start of the 2020s. But though filmic in its scope, these 10 vignettes are economically plotted (the album is just 30 minutes long), with a through-line that takes you just far enough before leaving you to your own conclusions about these characters’ motives.

He continues the good work with sixth album The Night Chancers, a set of seductive, atmospheric late-night grooves on which Dury conjures sinister vignettes of insomniac dwellers of the wee small hours.

A master of eulogising the grubby underbelly, Baxter’s is the kind of voice that’s utterly out of step with the modern, fearful, social media-courting world, and all the better for it.

Baxter Dury blossomed on 2017's Prince Of Tears. ... This sixth solo outing explores further that album's blend of mechanical funk and luxuriant orchestration of female-sung choruses and character monologues. [Apr 2020, p.86]