HMS Fable

If their new record wasn't such a frustrating listen, there would be few more deserving success stories in today's pop world than Shack. HMS Fable - the sixth album in an extraordinary career which has seen them sign to and get dropped from countless labels, watch their original bassist die from a brain tumour, have their mastertapes destroyed in a studio fire,while their driving force Michael Head nearly succumbed to heroin addiction - has finally been released to unanimously positive reviews.

It's roosting in the upper reaches of the UK charts as we speak, and looks like being the sleeper hit rock album of 1999. Which is why I'm amazed that so far, nobody seems to have called Head's creative bluff. Shack, for all their undoubted melodic strengths and potency, are virtually an Oasis tribute band, a fact which no amount of critical plaudits and colourful biog details can conceal.

On too much of HMS Fable, the same old reference point keeps occurring. I hummed 'Some Might Say' along to 'Natalie's Party'. 'Lend's Some Dough' was called 'She's Electric' last time I heard it. 'Pull Together' might as well be 'Live Forever' with a tweaked verse structure. I could go on.

There are at least three songs on HMS Fable which transcend their mediocre surroundings: the intricately-constructed 'Comedy', a beguiling artifice of crackling guitars and violin; the mesmerising smack ballad 'Streets Of Kenny'; and 'Reinstated', with its Burt Bacharach horns and clever piano arpeggiato frills. It's on these tracks that Head's vocals, rather stodgy and unremarkable elsewhere, shake off their limitations to dominate the songs perfectly.

So basically, plenty of golden moments, but too many grey ten-minute spells in between.