NATURAL HABITAT

FURNITURE ARE conservative.

'The Wrong People' is a catalogue of caught moments; small, vain and worried. It's a nosey record. It's full of the sort of songs you see in faces on buses and shops windows. Songs like 'She Gets Out The Scrapbook', 'I Miss You' and self-conscious-white-boy single-of-the-year 'Brilliant Mind' fill ordinary stories with the luminescence of stained-glass windows — a sentimental analogy, I know, but an appropriate one. These are the songs of self-conscious white boys at prayer.

There's something irritating about the clanking plainness of Mick Glossop's production. The relish with which groups like this turn their brightest stained-glass conceits stone-grey in the studio is a thing you can trace back to Ray Davies. Not that Furniture are remotely like The Kinks. This lot are too suburban even for that.

So Furniture are striplings in the pop conservatism stakes. Songs like 'Pierre's Fight' find them poncing about in Ian McEwan closet neurosis-land, when they should be sniffing around under. But that's alright. There are at least five other songs here I'd be proud to play my grandchildren when they stop mewling and ask "Grandpa? What was it really like on a bus?"

This is very close to being a fine record.

Nick Coleman