Paul Weller: Heliocentric

Herald rating: ***

(Island)

Review: Russell Baillie

By rights, Paul Weller should have slipped into the where-are-they-now? category a while back. After all, the English rock veteran has already had a musical career of two era-defining halves - as the angry young Mod of the Jam, then as the soulful haircut and voice of the Style Council.

But at the start of the 90s, Weller started working under his own name. A decade later and we're up to this sixth solo album.

They may not have quite set the world alight (though 1995's r'n'b-fired Stanley Road sold a million in the UK during the Oasis-led Britrock bull run) but, just as Heliocentric does, they've showed that Weller, aged 42, has staved off the sometimes inevitable artistic decline that comes with middle age. Just like, say, Neil Young or Elvis Costello, Weller merits critical attention because he's still capable of adding - rather than detracting from - his musical legacy.

Here that means a solid, often dense, and musicianly collection that in its acoustic-framed songs echoes Wildwood (from 93, still the best of his solo efforts), though just as often its delivery recalls Weller's days on the Council. That's apparent on Frightened, the equally fetching With Time and Temperance, Sweet Pea, My Sweet Pea, and Picking Up Sticks (complete with drum solo). Most of those tracks find him in a guilty, reflective mood but elsewhere he's rocking and riled about the environment (the clumsy A Whale's Song), the powers that be (Back in the Fire) and his own everchanging booze-moods (the Bowie-ish There's No Drinking After You're Dead).

Heliocentric might well be too musically smart for its own good, but it seems Weller has staved off that artistic decline, once again.