Suede - a new morning

Here's our advice. Rent this CD from your local library and use its embedded internet link to access most of the songs in their original, Tony "Beck" Hoffer-produced versions. Then take the £14 you would've wasted buying the damn thing and spend it on a rock of crack for the newly-clean Brett Anderson. If this what Suede sound like drugs-free, he'll thank you for it in the long run.

While Hoffer's work seems to have sparkled with grace and ambition, this hack-job (bish-bash-boshed out by uberproducer Stephen Street) takes all the bland, tawdry, white-bread bits from the past two Suede albums, butters them up with a smear of Bon Jovi balladeering, chews them into gloop with nicotine-stained, plastic dentures and... well, ends up flushing a once-great career straight down the in-at-number-16-out-the-next-week toilet.

'Positivity' you know and ignored; clumsy next single, 'Obsessions' you'll hate too much to ignore; 'Beautiful Loser' has gnat's nads where even 'Elephant Man' had mammoth marbles; 'Streetlife' is half-dead, 'Astrogirl' brain-dead and '...Morning' dead in the water. All the lyrics are, inevitably, shit. Only 'Lost In TV' and 'When The Rain Falls' rekindle any interest, but the former languishes in cliché while the latter flounders forlornly without the experimental, android emotion Hoffer's original production lent it.

'A New Yawning' it is, then; lacking any trace of the ambition Suede desperately needed to conjure. You caught this bus 10 years ago. The route is still running, but you've already moved on.