Brendan Benson "My Old, Familiar Friend"

Brendan Benson's debut album One Mississippi was something of a revelation, a heady mixture of infectious pop songs and balladry that worked perfectly. He followed it up with Lapalco, which was solid, but lacked the inventiveness of his first. By The Alternative to Love - best described as "ponderous" - any remaining magic seemed to have disappeared, and as a consequence I almost entirely ignored his high-profile venture with Jack White (The Raconteurs). Yet whilst his fourth solo album offers definite reasons to be positive again, it also feels like further proof that he's content to stick to the middle of the road.

"A Whole Lot Better" starts proceedings off in a musically upbeat manner, with the song detailing the narrator's inability to decide whether or not the girl in his life is good for him - he keeps falling in and out of love with her, and cannot make up his mind one way or another (a wonderful breakdown sums up the dilemma perfectly). It has the kind of energy that powers nearly all of Benson's best tunes, and such is certainly the case on this album. The clear standout track "Poised and Ready" is fantastic straight-up rock, catchy as hell and fit to soundtrack any indie disco where the kids just want to dance. It also kicks off the best sequence on the album - it's followed by a couple of songs in a similar vein, "Don't Wanna Talk" and "Misery." Elsewhere, the slow build of "Feel Like Taking You Home" works perfectly, offering a balance between drive and restraint that the album benefits from; and the kitchen-sink-esque quality that runs through "Garbage Day" lifts it above most of Benson's ballads.

However, the "other" side of Benson's work is also on evidence here. "Eyes On The Horizon" is an uninspired, classic rock by-the-numbers effort; "Gonowhere" is a plodding track that, appropriately, goes nowhere, and "You Make A Fool Out Of Me" is pretty much identical to it. Songs like these serve to highlight the problem with Benson's output. About half of his songs can be filed under power-pop, and half under easy listening, and that kind of constant switching between the two vastly different genres comes across as somewhat schizoprehnic, and the gap between the highs and the lows is positively chasmic.

It is this level of inconsistency that makes My Old, Familiar Friend so difficult to recommend. When it is good, it genuinely is very good, but when it's bad, it ranges from mediocre to painfully dull, and ultimately, not really worth your time. It's only right to hold true to the belief that albums are intended to be heard as a whole, and the number of skippable tracks this one contains seriously damages its worth.