Gecko Turner’s brand new album Gone Down South opens up with a glorious hook filled soul number called Truly. It is packed full of fanfare horns and laid back jazz piano chords with Gecko’s soulful vocals drifting softly over the top. Had we just had a summer, Truly would have been the perfect song to soundtrack it – along with the rest of this album. These songs were built for the summer, but not even the good weathers no-show this year can detract from the glory and the fun demonstrated in these songs.

Gone Down South is not all soul though; Turner has thrown a huge number of styles and genres into the mix, from the salsa of Cuanta Suerte to the trippy acoustic pop stylings of So Sweet, a song that takes influence from The Velvet Underground. The way Gecko Turner effortlessly plays with genre is a real pleasure to listen to.

The album’s real standout tracks are those that openly embrace Prince-style funk rhythms and instrumentation, such as Tea Time, and Let’s Say Tonight: the former a fast paced and fun number, the second a more tender ballad with wah-wah guitar and horns, with an emotive vocal delivery and a super-chilled call and response chorus. Gecko is a master of genre but in funk he really excels.

If there are any bad points to this album, they are few and far between. It could be said that some of the songs drag on aimlessly for far too long, like the laid back So Sweet. This is a laid back album and sometimes the line blurs between what you can call laid back, and what is just lazy. Also, the drum-machine fuelled dance tracks like The Love Monk just seem lazy compared to the inventive mixing of influences and genres on display elsewhere on the album. A final sticking point, which is seriously only a minor niggle is that a few of the lyrics are sung in Spanish, so unless you’re a Spanish speaker they might be lost on you, but for the most part, this album is a fun and brilliant piece of work.

Gone Down South closes by embracing yet another genre with its title track, a chilled blues piano track. Such free flowing and easy mastery of so many different genres is a rare thing to witness; there is just so much packed into this album that it just keeps on revealing more with subsequent listens. With a little trimming here and there, Gone Down South is nothing short of modern gem.