.. it remains not a million miles from familiar ground – Broken Bottles and Chandeliers, a ballad that unfurls slowly around his distinctive bruised croon, is especially Elbow-like. But the differences are not so slight as to make the project pointless: there’s a diversion into smoky Parisian jazz on Electricity, while Yesterday boasts the percussive clatter of Tom Waits and climaxes with an almost madrigalesque melody. How much you value such gently experimental foraging over Elbow’s typically rousing melodies might determine your enjoyment of this: it certainly leans towards the former."

At the album’s heart, however, are the sketched impressions of quiet emotional turmoil that have become part of Garvey’s stock-in-trade, a personal space bookended here by the ebullient energy so charmingly contained by the plaintive melodica, cycling piano and dulcimer of “Juggernaut” and the gloom that finds him "missing that moody girl" in "Harder Edges". "I’m sick of ticking boredom, counting down the beating hours,” he notes; “She was capable of kind, but not inclined" – a couplet that carries a whole world of regret.

Guy Garvey’s solo debut follows the classic pattern – he’s off to play trad-based songs that “don’t fit the Elbow template” with his mates from I Am Kloot (bassist Pete Jobson) and The Whip (guitarist Nathan Sudders), don’t wait up. But as it reels out the old lines it proves quite the charmer. It delves into dusky Parisian jazz on the languorous "Electricity", a duet with Jolie Holland that sounds like he’s fallen headfirst into a very sad Billie Holiday record. There are pleasingly askew attempts at strutting, sax-honking Blaxploitation funk in the form of "Harder Edges" and "The Belly Of The Whale", complete with a very wonky interlude of George Michael’s "Careless Whisper". It even gives off comforting wafts of Elbow’s widescreen-indie wet dog smell on "Juggernaut" and the pastoral title track to seduce anyone turning up hoping he might bung ‘"One Day Like This" on it out of sheer habit.