Tom Jones: “Surrounded by Time”

Tom Jones is now eighty. The musician, born in Wales but spiritually a habitant of Las Vegas, has proved strangely resilient, with a booming, hollow voice that allows him to acculturate to any given era, whether channelling sixties buoyancy, seventies lechery, or nineties irony. “Surrounded by Time,” the fourth LP Jones has recorded in his winter years with the producer Ethan Johns, comes steeped in gravity, with Jones belting out far-ranging covers over arrangements that jump and growl. The big surprise is his neo-psychedelic rendering of “Talking Reality Television Blues,” among the sharpest pieces of agit-pop from the Trump years, by the sparkplug Nashville songwriter Todd Snider. The recording is darker than Snider’s, in theory and in practice: when Tom Jones bares political fangs, the global situation must be dire.