After their Road Music debut hitched a lift on the alt.country bandwagon, Grand Drive have commandeered their own vehicle, alt.soul.
With the harmonising Wilson brothers yearning for their lives, the band emerge sounding like Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes after an eternity in a battered Transit listening to Mercury Rev. The songs here are their most rewarding yet.
Hammonds rumble, slide guitars shimmer like rhinestones and songs are full of warmth and impossible dreams (the girl in Firefly who wishes upon the stickers on her wall, the doomed lovers who take on the world in You and I).
They probably also contain innumerable metaphors about the Drive's attempt to compete with plastic pop. The childhood-reminiscing Track 40 ("Walking home bikes with flattened tyres, smelling of smoke from starting fires") has a distressingly final feel about it, but the ace A Little of You offers a decent crack at a hit.
