ALBUMS OF THE WEEK

Paul Weller Fat Pop (Volume 1) Polydorout May14 ★★★★★

The increasingly prolific ex-Jam legend returns just ten months after the mostly satisfying On Sunset. He opens here with Cosmic Things, a surprising, sparse electronic track where he pitches his vocal somewhere between Ian Dury and Damon Albarn. The title track nods to David Bowie’s Fashion and is equally spare. But on tracks such as Glad Time, The Pleasure and others he defaults, as he has done too often in the last two decades, to a sludgy take on sixties rhythm and blues and blue-eyed soul reminiscent of the unremittingly mediocre Ocean Colour Scene; no accident perhaps as the band’s guitarist

Steve Craddock has been the Modfather’s six-string wingman for nearly 30 years. Much better is Failed which is like America’s Horse With No Name via Gorillaz and

Still Glides The Stream, a bewitching closer which seems to address the conflict of making art for art’s sake or money.