Graham Coxon- The Spinning Top review

I have a secret to confess.
You may think its unfashionable to say or even wrong. I like Britpop.
These days, Britpop is considered a byword for untastefull crap, common people and very big houses in the country, Tony Blair and Parkas. If one bastion of "Cool Britania" doesn't deserve this levelled at him its Graham Coxon.
Even at the time, the Blur Guitarist was the anti-Britpop, sulking in a haystack in the "Country House" video or staying out of the ridiculous Blur-Oasis feud. And now hes made his best solo album to date.
What makes "The Spinning Top" so great is the way each song conveys a different emotion more aptly than almost any album I've heard.
The first two tracks convey the simple joy of merely being alive, Coxon's finger-picking guitar style sweeps over you like audial opium. However it won't be these tracks that sell the album to you as the best of 2009 so far.
"In the Morning" is almost perfect. A sweet aucstic lullabye that makes you feel eveything will be alright in the end. Lines like "Theres a melody in every line/ and a sorrow in these eyes of mine/ if a diamond hangs from evey tree and a life is lost for every leaf can a bird still sing?" sung in a beautifull estury croon makes you wonder why Albarn was ever the frontman. Its by far the standout track of the album.
Other highlights come with "Brave the Storm" and "Home", two other elegant accoustic ditties.
The most "rockin'" Coxon gets is with "Dead Bees". He picks up his trusty Telecaster and gives you a song that would have happily fitted in on a later Blur album, perhaps as a b-side to "Beetlebum".
The reccord does suffer from a couple of tracks that could have been shaved off, notably "Caspian sea" and the single "Sorrow's Army". "Caspian sea" is to put plainly boring and suffers from terrible production with stupidly overdubbed guitars that make it sound like some prog-rock reject. Similarly "Sorrows's Army" is boring but in a different way, you're left waiting for the big hook that never comes and are just rewarded with a slightly more obvious drum beat.
With 16 tracks and clocking in at over an hour long "The Spinning Top" could be regarded as pretentious but the opposite is true.
Now listen: go out and buy this album, while you're at it buy "Parklife" as well.