Brendan Benson: Lapalco

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * * * )

Caution: Yet another smart-alec self-aware singer-songwriter at work.

But Detroit's Brendan Benson is one of the good ones, and not only because he's a sometime tour mate of the White Stripes.

On his third album, musically he's treading a familiar line in where powerpop meets alt-country rock.

But the character comes with Benson's voice - an Anglo-influenced thing which variously recalls the two most famous Beatles as well as Syd Barrett and Robyn Hitchcock - and in his lyrics which are literate, self-deprecatingly witty, bittersweet and wry. And often in the space of one verse.

Take the worryingly named early track Folk Singer about a struggling musician whose girlfriend puts him down with the withering line: "Stop pretending: you're not John Lennon."

There's some New Wave quirks to opener Tiny Spark, You're Quiet, some rousing pop-rockers on What and I'm Easy and Benson shows he has quite a way with a ballad on the equally lovely Metarie and Just Like Me.

He might risk starting a one-man Gilbert O'Sullivan revival on the piano-plonking closing Jet Lag, but the rest shows Benson is a singer-songwriter who's a smarter alec than most.

Label: V2