Album: Patrick Wolf

Watching Patrick Wolf perform on television the other night, I was immediately struck by how his shock of red hair, and his preferred piano-playing posture - half-turned towards the audience, legs wide apart - recalled Tori Amos, never the most agreeable comparison. Like her, Wolf was classically trained, and has issues that he's keen to share with us, some of which may have been best left behind with his adolescence - though judging by his presentational style, that may be a period he's reluctant to abandon. As a rule, a pop album should never open with an "Overture", and if it must, it shouldn't sound anything like "Mad World"; here, it introduces a tale of a youngster hiding his gift until he's ready to use it to best advantage - a routine adolescent-alienation theme given a contemporary gloss of X-Men superiority. But Wolf's private world seems a fairly mundane fairy-tale existence, judging by the enchanted-forest tone of tracks such as "Bluebells" and "Magpie", the latter featuring Marianne Faithfull murmuring gruffly like a Woodbine Witch over florid piano and strings, while Wolf warbles gently in the background. It doesn't really help.

DOWNLOAD THIS: 'Bluebells', 'Secret Garden'