Night Works

Gabriel Stebbings - the Urban Heat Island moniker remains unexplained - left Metronomy in 2009, smack bang between their awkward but evolutionary second album Nights Out and before their quixotic third, The English Riviera, turned frontman Joe Mount into a household name (Provided of course that the house in question read The Guardian).

Probably now relieved he doesn't have to take the risk of performing live with a plugged-in Wickes lightshade stuck to his chest, his first outing as a solo artist - we'll let him off contributing bass on one track of Nicola Roberts Cinderella's Eyes album - is definitely one for connoisseurs of left field pop. It might be churlish to point out that this is exactly where Metronomy themselves hang out on the musical map, but there's room for everyone there, and given that 98% of all contemporary music now seems to be derived from the same three or four elements, it's exhilarating to find an artist willing to throw everything in the air just to see how it lands.

Night Works comes accompanied by lots of blurb about being set "In the milky, pre-dawn hours", the soundtrack to a party with "The damned partying through the apocalypse". Blimey. The reality you'll be relieved to know is more serene, Stebbings leafing instead back through the last 30 years of speccy British campus rock on the gorgeous Nathaniel, a dead ringer for anything on Prefab Sprout's na

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