Album: The Cardigans

This album title reminds me of the joke about the man who called his pet parrot Holy Roman Empire because it was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire. There's nothing remotely super or extra about Super Extra Gravity, nor does it have the essential gravity required to hold the listener. Instead, it features the once bright Cardigans unravelling badly. When, in "Drip Drop Teardrop", Nina Persson sings, "I'm gonna sing until you hate this song", well, she doesn't know the half of it. This stalkerish, obsessive love song is the kind of thing that once would have shown off the band's most distinctive quality of effecting a spicily appealing contrast between the songs' sweet surfaces and the tart bitterness of their lyrical themes. Here, that curdles into something altogether more plodding and charmless. This sourness is in almost every track, from the glumly fatalistic opener "Losing a Friend" through to the concluding masochistic torch song "And Then He Kissed Me II", and has its nadir in "Holy Love". The one track that emerges with any appeal is the single, "I Need Some Fine Wine And You, You Need To Be Nicer", which, like many of the songs, anatomises the "long, slow collision" of a relationship.

DOWNLOAD THIS: 'I Need Some Fine Wine and You, You Need to be Nicer'