But "Walnut Whales" sounded radically out of time: the work of a peculiar singer-songwriter who was also, even more peculiarly, a harpist.
After all, things have never been normal in the world of this peculiar singer-songwriter from Walton-on-Thames, whom Melody Maker anointed its "new saviour of UK rock" in 1993.
Thanks to the soft shine of the black-and-white images, we come to know, with a peculiar fondness, the singer's house on the corner of a Macclesfield street, and the regular sight of him returning there like a soldier with his duffelbag.
A writer for Metro felt that the singer was as "peculiar as ever" on the artwork.
The Dublin of "The Dead" has echoes of Barcelona or Calcutta or Edinburgh in the early years of the 20th century, places where musical life could be conducted with a peculiar intensity, and songs and singers handed a strange power.
Singer Samuel Herring's own peculiar brand of performance is famously mesmerising.
Welles's peculiar childhood, surrounded by noted opera singers, instrumentalists, and donors, may have given him an early and heightened awareness of the contingencies of musical expression.
In a career of peculiar projects, it remains one of the singer's strangest: a collection of showtunes inspired by Burns's life and work.
Ms. White, who also employed a rich mezzo-soprano voice as a sometime cabaret singer, spoke openly about the peculiar racial challenge she faced in the 1960s: though roles for black performers were increasing, casting agents were continuing to think mainly in terms of "black" parts and "white" parts.
The peculiar Jing Jong mouthful was apparently coined by singer Joe Lean because it's exactly that - we're "supposed to have fun saying it".
The back-up singer and co-keyboardist, Emily Jane Kuntz, however, was rocking some sort of peculiar dance, that I have only been able to describe as a "heroin sway".
