As a slightly strange teenager I was heavily into Action Spectacular. Those records still mean a lot to me, so finding this album 20 years later was a delight. It's not more of the same, but it is (obviously) in the same lineage, though more delicate and poignant. I can see why some critics drew a lazy comparison with Pulp, but to my mind a closer comparison would be someone like Barney Farmer - storytelling that finds beauty and horror in the mundane, with an occasional tiny glimmer of hope.
