Future Pilot aka Salute Your Soul

Future Pilot aka, aka Sushil K. Dade, possesses, like Therapy?, a moniker designed to make reviewing complicated. Here he follows up his acclaimed Tiny Waves Mighty Sea with an album that mixes dub, psychedelia, Indian chants, reggae and a tiny dash of punk. Even veteran New York avant-gardist Philip Glass is on hand to lend vocals and a curious kind of spiritual guidance, alongside a rambling recollection about Ravi Shankar. Recorded in a tenement flat in Glasgow last summer (so they say), and including a rap attack by ex Clash producer Mikey Dread, live from his studios in Miami, Salute Your Soul is an album of musical collaboration, spiritual succour, and political intent. As Mikey Dread says, quoting Woody Guthrie, this machine will kill fascists.

Soothing it certainly is. Dear Lord echoes Blur's Tender, without the slightly cloying feeling you get listening to forty-year old men going all gooey. Aap Ke Bina is a dreamy chorus of sweet chanting. Soul classic If You're Ready (Come Go With Me) is reinvented as an anthem of peace and universal harmony, while Salute the Divine Within You is a very nice attempt at the instrumentals Badly Drawn Boy did when he was interesting.

Where I'm not convinced though is in the album's political pretensions. Love of the Land styles itself as a protest song, backed by a gang that includes some of Glasgow's finest, including ex-Subway Sect vocalist Vic Godard, Norman Blake (Teenage Fanclub) and James Kirk (Orange Juice), but it borders on a poor imitation of the Levellers. And that's dangerous territory. The Clash influence is clear and welcome, as on the mangrove stomp of Dammers or Czukay, but elsewhere its pop-appropriation of chants, tabla and chimes sounds alarmingly like those CDs you buy from bong stalls in Camden, or someone ripping off Nitin Sawney for Guardian readers. Moreover, I'll never be convinced that getting stoned and talking about spiritual enlightenment is an effective means to global change.

There's always a danger that an album praising universal peace and harmony turns into a fucking hippy nightmare, as on First Moon, like being stuck in the pub with a cider-quaffing lad called Rupert who inexplicably has dreads and a Jamaican flag on his t-shirt. There's even an elephant thrown in on Pehli Chaand. That's not to say Dade doesn't mean it - he sure does, and has the musical know-how to back it up - but at times there are too many cosmic clichés and too little musical edge. Never trust a man who smiles all the time. Sometimes you need to sneer a little.