The Music: The Music

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * )

This month's ballyhooed British band, the Music's debut album shows in these nouveau garage-rock days that there is still room apparently for rock of cosmic ambitions requiring a stoner concentration span.

Yes, what the Leeds quartet with the problematic name and a stringbean singer named Robert Harvey do, they do rather well. That's surging, world-without-end songs that echo a pre-punk era before they were born.

They also sound like they are on the same water supply as their fellow Yorkshiremen the Verve, or at least the band of their early psychedelic era.

And if they can sound a bit Led Zeppelin, it's likely to be strained through generational touchstones such as the Stone Roses and Jane's Addiction.

They do quite a good line in majestic and groovy bluster throughout the 10 tracks (average length six minutes), especially on early ones such as The Dance and Take the Long Road and Walk It.

But it doesn't help that some tracks do tend towards ye olde overdressed blues rock (Turn Out the Light and the ironically titled Disco).

And too soon you do start to wonder: where's it all going, er, man?

And why does that one sound like the last one? And will someone please turn down that annoying reverb and the singer's helium supply?

Label: Virgin