Album: Catatonia

It's difficult, listening to the accumulation of worry, self-disgust and hedonistic declarations of mea culpa on Paper Scissors Stone, not to take Cerys Matthews's recent highly publicised retreat to rehab with at least a pinch of salt. What a coincidence that she should be seeking Priory-style treatment mere days before releasing an album featuring lyrics such as: "The queen of clubs drinks in pubs on her days off, over/ Swills down dregs, drags on duck-arsed cigarettes"; not to mention a track called "Is Everybody Here on Drugs?", doubtless devised to evince an affirmative audience response at live shows. Of course, it could just be a case of her art mirroring her life, though Cerys's boozing is, on this showing, the least of the band's problems. More pressing, surely, is the glaring absence of a hook as memorable as "Road Rage" or "Mulder & Scully"; the closest they come here is the single "Stone by Stone". Nor is their knack of tapping into that kind of tabloid cliché as potent as before, the blatherings of "Fuel" ("Go ask the government you voted in on trust/ Where is our fuel?") being dated and hopelessly confused. To be fair, the band are trying to broaden their approach beyond the shrinking indie market, with string arrangements, dyspeptic horns, token clubby drum programmes and old-hat didgeridoo drones, but ultimately it sounds more like cowardice than courageous exploration.