Album: Gordon Haskell

Harry's Bar, Eastwest

Compared with the "Parental Advisory" warnings routinely plastered over hip-hop and nu-metal albums, the sticker borne by Harry's Bar – "As heard on BBC Radio 2" – has to be the world's least glamorous consumer announcement. For all that, it's still a worthy warning of the album's contents, which are closer in spirit and sound to the old comfy-slippers Radio 2 than to its new, more sprightly incarnation. For Harry's Bar is geezer-rock of the most dreary kind, with titles such as "Feelin' Loose" and "Roll with It" (not the Oasis song) accurately conveying the bland, desultory nature of the music, which features Haskell's smoky baritone applied to a bunch of love songs in the vein of "How Wonderful You Are", though less memorable. The unassuming soft-rock settings are mostly hung on acoustic-guitar frameworks, with sax and fiddle providing discreet, excruciatingly tasteful detailing here and there: exactly the kind of limpid, characterless stuff favoured by slightly older musos in search of a "classy" sound. Hence, presumably, the ambient style of self-produced tracks such as "Sunshine in the Night", which aims for the misty, wispy atmosphere of Daniel Lanois productions, but without the gilt-edged material Lanois gets to play with. For those who liked the single, Harry's Bar may offer a pleasant hour's relaxation, but it won't leave much of an impression: to borrow an image from Dylan, it plays soft, but there's nothing, really nothing, to turn off.