Gaz Coombes Here Come The Bombs

No matter how far Gaz Coombes has travelled from the days when no festival bill was complete without Supergrass chirping out Alright, he can't escape his gift for writing songs with hooks you can hang a coat on.

His debut solo album is packed with them, starting with Bombs, which links one of his wooziest, prettiest melodies to a lyric that gets inside the "mind" of a bomb as it falls to earth: "What a lonely view as I tear away, breaking sound, speeding down."

You get the feeling, from the electronic curlicues, guitar-distortion and guttural dance beats that crop up throughout the album, that Coombes would have loved to ditch the choruses and devote the entire record to off-piste experimenting (the six-minute Universal Cinema, which begins acoustically and gradually cranks up the distortion, shows a musical mindset no longer informed by chart positions).

But even as he thrashes and fulminates ("Everybody is a whore in a world that's sold out" is his sour take on things in Whore), he can't keep the gorgeous melodies at bay.

01 – Bombs
02 – Hot Fruit
03 – Whore
04 – Sub Divider
05 – Universal Cinema
06 – Simulator
07 – White Noise
08 – Fanfare
09 – Break The Silence
10 – Daydream On A Street Corner
11 – Sleeping Giant