Ten years between drinks, not counting Ovo, is a long time. Now it's finally out, you sort of think that he might've put something like this out half a decade ago and people wouldn't been complaining. But now, thew. It's not a bad album, by any means, but was it worth the wait? Hmm...

Mortality's on the agenda, a logical progression from the themes surrounding Us, and for the most part, it's a correspondingly grim affair, especially on the opener "Darkness", which alternates jarringly between noisy synths and compressed drumloops in one phase, and Gabriel's vulnerable voice debrief great fears about drowning.

The other thing you notice is that most of the songs are too bloody long; "Growing Up" practically repeats itself, turning what would've been a punchy 3½ minute number into a plodding epic. The same for the single "The Barry Williams Show", which to me seems like a thematic hodgepodge of "Games Without Frontiers", "Family Snapshot" and "Big Time". Really. Except that "Big Time" was sort of funky. Mind you, "Barry Williams" is hardly the silliest thing he's put to record, so we'll just pretend it never happened, courtesy of the censorous majesty that is Mister Skip Button.

"Signal To Noise" isn't too long, though, it that case, seven minutes is barely enough. Though dead for five years, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's voice careens spookily through the first half, before the strings kick in and take it over the top and once again, just to make sure we get the point. We get it. With that, "Sky Blue", with its ghostly echoes of "Mercy Street" with added vocal oomph from the Blind Boys of Alabama, and the transformation half through "I Grieve" from another dirge into a reserved "life goes on" affirmation, these are worth the price of admission alone.

Perhaps I'll find other things to like on the album, but even with a savage edit, there's plenty here. It may not be the end-to-end stormer that Us was, but there's plenty cut from the same stuff.