Album: BPA, I Think We're Gonna, Need a Bigger Boat (Southern Fried)

I Think We're Gonna Need a Bigger Boat is another example of retro-fabrication, albeit with less reverential intentions than Raphael Saadiq.

The BPA, or Brighton Port Authority, is the pseudonym for Norman Cook and Simon Thornton's jokey little project about a fictional band from the Seventies whose recordings – fronted by chums like Iggy, David Byrne, Dizzee Rascal, Jamie T and Martha Wainwright – supposedly anticipated many developments in pop and rock. But there's little to hold the idea together save set-dressing and the dubious irony of bogus anachronism. Musically, it's all over the place, rarely memorably: the spindly funk of "Dirty Sheets" has the emaciated cast of No Wave bands like The Contortions and Bush Tetras; "Should I Stay or Should I Blow" is twitchy ska laced with electronic whines; "The Jam" is an incoherent collision of Byrne and Dizzee; and "Island" finds Justin Robertson adopting the semi-spoken vocal guise of a louche David Bowie. But none of the tracks sounds like it just had to exist, and that lack of any compulsive quality ultimately dooms the project to marginal curio status. I think we're gonna need a bigger landfill...

Pick of the album:'Dirty Sheets', 'Jumps the Fence', 'Island'