Album: Colin Blunstone, The Ghost of You and Me, (Ennismore)

If we must have mainstream pop about mature romance, then we should ask that it always be sung by Colin Blunstone. The Zombies' frontman's pipes are a miracle of softness and tensile strength.

And that is where the comparisons with toilet paper should end. Better, we should admire its clarity, sweetness and its capacity for spreading itself on baroque strings like butter. The best songs here are decent, the worst clammy, but all of them just that fraction too ingratiating to ring true except as pillow talk.

Pick of the album: 'Beginning': nice strings and no searing guitars

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