| What happens when rock's young whippersnappers grow up? The last few Supergrass albums have seen a creeping maturity enter their happy-go-lucky design, but on Road To Rouen - the Oxford outfit's fifth album - there's little trace remaining of the wide-eyed adolescents that barrelled so madly through "Caught By The Fuzz". The opening "Tales Of Endurance (Parts 4,5 & 6)" is a case in point: evolving from a gentle, rolling vista of warm brass and stroked piano into a rollicking rock groove over five-and-a-half minutes, frontman Gaz Coombes cooing lyrics about "commercial suicide" from the centre of the jam, it's unquestionably the work of a band with pretensions that reach far beyond the desire to pen a tight pop single. This would be a terrible thing if the `Grass didn't have the chops to pull it off, but the likes of the gently Beatlesesque "St Petersburg" and the string-augmented "Roxy" boast the sort of intuitive, on-point musicmanship that would shame a band twice their age. And pleasingly, too, there's still room for the odd burst of eccentricity, in the shape of the peculiar, polka-tinged "Coffee In The Pot". --Louis Pattison |
