SIX

Mansun's Six is best experienced in its original, full-length track listing of 13 songs (or 14 if you have the Japanese-only bonus track); a castrated version of the album was issued in the US with only 11 tracks, but when a band dedicates itself this thoroughly to excess trying to hold back becomes counter-productive. This isn't the first time anyone tried to fuse British indie rock of the Britpop era with progressive rock - Marillion tried a somewhat similar experiment with Brave a few years earlier, though that leaned much more heavily on the prog side of the equation - but Mansun's Six deserves notice for the way it applies proggy song structures to songs performed more or less in a Britpop style, bar for the occasional technically complex bit and a few pretty keyboard flourishes.

The lyrical themes draw on various bits and pieces of pop culture - there's lots of Prisoner references, fourth Doctor Who Tom Baker reads a bit of poetry, in the last song you can hear the TARDIS dematerialising - but what's more interesting to me is how the band are able to put this all together into a cohesive musical trip. It took me a while to appreciate it and I'm not sure it's an unalloyed success, but it's a very worthwhile experiment which came up trumps - and was more or less ignored and forgotten about on release. Oh well.