Not the easiest record to grasp. It's a turn - though not a complete one - from the soul edgings of The Greatest and Jukebox, and while it has something of the genreless air of their immediate predecessor, You Are Free (with the benefit of distance from its original release, a really excellent, enduring record, incidentally, almost up there with Moon Pix), it doesn't have that other's clean, stripped-down, percussive sense of being rock-pop music rendered somehow new. Perhaps it's the first real pop album that she's put out - which is counterintuitive, as any of those others that I've already mentioned have plenty more immediate songs on them. Anyway, for all of that, it's good, even if not immediately lovable. ("Nothing But Time" is pretty magnificent, all 11 minutes of it.)
