British Sea Power first burst onto the music scene a few years ago with their superb debut album 'The Decline of...' which mixed an indie sensibility with a quirky style, all injected with pop tunes such as 'Remember Me'. Whilst this quirkiness did set them apart from many other bands, it did little to break them into the public eye. Most bands, faced with this challenge, would re-evaluate their style and adopt a more straight-forward approach to making music.

Fortunately BSP have done nothing of the sort, Open Season is another collection of weird but brilliant songs, highlights include recent single 'It Ended on An Oily Stage', a song about reaching the bottom of the bottle/barrel whatever and looking up.

Elsewhere on the album finds the band examining more environmentally conscious issues on the song 'O Larsen B', a song about a polar icecap falling down but which is expressed as a ballad, of sorts, featuring the lyric 'O Larsen B, you can fall on me'. Jet, these guys aren't.

The album is not without fault, some of the songs do go on ever so slightly long and when they do it is usually because they disappear into instrumenatation, which, although often brilliant, do not do as much as extra lyrical content would.

However, that small gripe aside, this is a fantastic off-kilter pop-album with intelligent lyrics and really fantastic tunes. This album deserves to push them further up the musical ladder, and at the very least should make them THE band to see at the summer festivals.

9/10