The Nothing - A Warm Gun

Rating: * * * *

The last album by this lot was billed as "Chris Knox and the Nothing". While he might have subsumed himself in the band name, multimedia wonderboy Knox is still the voice and songs of the outfit.

And as he bounces through the 12 tracks sounding like a man still in a youthful first flush of rock fervour - not one nearly 30 years and 20 albums or EPs into a music career - it's hard not to get caught up in Knox's natural exuberance. Or when he delivers that trademark yelp  - surely something that should get its own tribute on an upcoming episode of Rocked the Nation - it's a reminder that the old boy still knows how to make this stuff sound like fun. Even when it's heading a bit glum in the lyric department.

And as ever, it's as catchy as all get-out too, whether it's the yelp-happy All I Want is You (even when it gets rhythmically out of sorts towards the end), the amusingly metal Empty, the jagged scathing-wit ballads Song Of The Tall Poppy and Out of the Abyss, or the grim failed-relationship portrait that Knox's words draw in She's Leaving Him.

But there's room too for another devotional love song - echoing his classic Not Given Lightly - on In My Heart. And as always, Knox the rockologist pays due reverence to his Fab forbears on that title (a reference which also cropped up on the last Nothing album) and on Then She Exploded which comes with a barrage of string crescendos,  seemingly copped from the famous end of A Day in the Life.

It's a grand touch to an album that might not have his name on it, but is one of Knox's better sets. 

 Russell Baillie