Pop review: Graham Coxon: The Spinning Top

Having made up with Damon Albarn and returned to Blur, guitarist Graham Coxon shows further signs of mellowing on his seventh solo LP, which casts him as a finger-picking folkie in the Nick Drake/John Martyn mould. Sadly, the results are underwhelming. The spare arrangements leave Coxon's reedy, off-key croon cruelly exposed and too often he mistakes self-indulgence for whimsicality, letting the Indiantinged "In the Morning " and funereal dirge "November " long outstay their welcomes. Indeed, he's at his best when reverting to rockier form, as on the muscular, swaggering "Dead Bees ".