Solarized

One track in particular will get the lads excited - "Keep What Ya Got", a somewhat unremarkable collaboration with Oasis' Noel Gallagher. Luckily, there's much more adventurous fare to be found elsewhere: "Time Is My Everything", for instance - an Ennio Morricone-style piece of atmospheric Wild West pop, featuring brass courtesy of Tim Hutton of Groove Armada - or "Upside", a moody number about poverty and inequality that finds Brown barking "7% own 84% of everything on earth/ Oil is the spice to make man forget man's worth" over eerie backwards drum whooshes.

Exotic flavours are something of an album theme - several tracks feature melodic allusions to Middle Eastern or South American music. Mind you, when you can decipher Brown's sometimes abstract lyrics, it's clear his concerns are rooted in the here and now--see "Kiss Ya Lips (No I.D)" and its defiant anti-Blunkett refrain: "I ain't no number/ Don't need no I.D card around my neck." --Louis Pattison