Or rather, half the album is like one, and half like the other. It kicks off in typically idiosyncratic style. The pips lead into a charming song all about the radio - "I can't wait / to get sick / so I can go to bed / the covers over / and the speakers by my head..." Yes, it was always thus. Disarming lyrics and a background of varied and always interesting, almost ambient sound.

Lushlife is very Jack - though production on this album is nothing like as polished as the landmark albums Pioneer Soundtracks and The Jazz Age. A lovely, flowing song, and the Reynolds croon is in good nick: "We're too beautiful to die / while we're too busy living / such a lush life / oh my..." Lovely acoustic guitar too, and shades of Lolita Elle, also echoed in The Sad Streets - another upbeat ballad despite the title.

It starts to get a bit more experimental - more Jacques in How To Make Love mode - for the prelude to Machiavellian Girl, but when the track itself kicks in there's a terrific techno backbeat more reminiscent of The End Of The Way It's Always Been. Classic Reynolds lyrics here - the themes of love and booze are never far away in his songs: "Tonight we'll get drunk and fall in love 'til the morning f***s it up..."

Good Times is very low-key Jacques, just the voice, a softly picked acoustic guitar, a few eerie background noises and some very mournful lyrics. Dear Melvyn is a delightful homage to the influence The South Bank Show had on an impressionable youth: "Teenage bedroom 1987 / I watch a black and white portable television..." Wry and charming stuff.

The second half of the album is patchy, but some tracks reward careful listening. If July Were A Kingdom is one of the standout tracks, with its otherworldly, distant sound and overlaid crackles as if from a scratchy old LP. This is a downbeat song with an epic trying to get out, and atmospheric violin. 2,000 Miles (Boxing Day Blues) is more gloomy stuff but beautiful if you're in the right mood...

I Sit With The Smokers is a real oddity - an unidentified female voice reading over random electronica. Can't really see the point of this track, I must say. Ditto Dalston Interlude, which I assume is Reynolds & friends recorded chatting idly in the days before he moved out of said location.

The album ends on a lovely note however, with a hauntingly beautiful and strange song on another of Reynolds continuing themes. Surreal lyrics and strangely warped melodies crawl all through Drugs Are My Drugs. It's probably not a track to wake up to but is stunning very late at night. Which, now I come to think of it, goes for a lot of Anthony Reynolds' music.

This album doesn't blow you away as the early ones did, but it's good - and very good in places - and that's enough to be going on with.

share:  Facebook | Digg | del.icio.us | more

Mercury Prize 2009 nominees