Tales of subversion and suburban sex by any other name would smell as - well, not sweet, certainly; pungent, maybe.

The French are Darren Hayman and John Morrison of Hefner, now minus drummer Ant, who now has his own career as a purveyor of winsome lo-fi love songs.

Local Information picks up where the disappointing final Hefner album, Dead Media, left off: it reinvents as a wry electropop outfit a band whose touchstones were once Violent Femmes and early Elvis Costello.

The good news is that Hayman is back on form: his songs are metropolitan, scalpel-sharp, dustily romantic. Against gently fluttering, unpretentious toy-box electronics - redolent of Momus's late-1980s albums and, sometimes, Warp's retro-futurist nursery school boffins Plone - Hayman proves himself once more to be Britain's most incisive songwriter, an unflinching professor of the ordinary.

Local Information nails every target in its sights: proletarian romance, middle age bland-out (on the delicious Gabriel in the Airport - he means Peter Gabriel, of course), even US white supremacists (the discomfiting The Pines).

Here is sly magnificence at every turn.