Brett Anderson, Brett Anderson

Don't write-off Brett Anderson, this is good stuff. If you've liked anything by Brett Anderson in the past then this album deserves a listen. This album is probably better than most you're going to here this year, even if it is less fashionable. In fact if you listen to the album and like it, then I suggest you buy the singles too for their B-Sides, as those from the 1st single alone are better than some of the album tracks. Lyrically he can be repetitive, sometimes he's goes a bit ridiculous, but then he takes chances. When he's on form you get moments on this album you don't get elsewhere. Listen to "Scorpio Rising" on his MySpace profile - who else does this sort of stuff? Try it out.

Sorry to stab in your back, fellow Suede fans - but maybe it's time to recognise the show's been over since 1999 (Head Music was good back then, fantastic by the standards of today.

I hate most of the tracks, to be honest. He even managed to spoil "Song for My Father" in the end, maybe just in order to get over 35 min.

You ve had your fun / your money's gone / your only friend is the telephone / oh duchess / now you're one of us.

Go buy his album anyway. Apart from the fact that he is a great live performer, what he's given to music (and maybe will give in the future, in the future, when all's well :-) he deserves eternal respect and some sort of pension, har har...

Brett Anderson promised a challenging new record with a new sound and the most personal lyrics he'd ever written. What he has delivered is an album that sounds like outtakes from the final Suede studio album, A New Morning, and lyrics that read like they were faxed in from on holiday, fulfilling all his usual cliches about beauty, rain, littter, breezes, love, drugs, etc. There is no better way to describe this record than as a slightly ludicrously over-dramatised marriage between the second disc of Sci-Fi Lullabies and A New Morning with inept guitar playing over-laden with strings to hide the lack of skill in the arrangements, production and mixing. While a couple of tracks do strike a chord, namely the lead single, Love Is Dead, and To The Winter, the rest of this should be consigned to the dustbin as a failed experiement. A couple of tracks are properly cringeworthy, notably Dust and Rain with the overused love as a drug metaphor and primary school rhyming couplets, Colour of the Night which is fairly patronising and One Lazy Morning which plays on tired notions of spiritual growth in a way he's always publicly rejected in the past. Brett should go back to writing with a partner, somebody who has a bit more musical skill than he.