While a carbon copy of their phenomenal debut album, Attack Of The Grey Lantern, probably wouldn't have been the best follow-up, something as polar opposite as Six--sounding not just like a different album but a different band--was equally ill-advised. Where Lantern was lavished with dark moods, epic strings and--in "Stripper Vicar", "Taxloss" and "Wide Open Space"--some supreme songs, it's successor was a snarling beast of an album, with tunes lost in ridiculously complex and totally inaccessible eight minute songs. Wisely, for their third album, Little Kix, Mansun have chosen to redress the balance with a little compromise; combining some of the drama and imagination of the first with the stripped-down, if not so hard, rock of the second. And for Mansun, who already have the strangest of melodies and Paul Draper's deep/lunatic ramblings for lyrics, a little self-restraint and compromise is most definitely a good thing. In fact, by toning down the orchestral grandeur and rock excesses, they've let the eerie and unhinged harmonies of "Fool", "Butterfly", "Forgive Me" and "I Can Only Disappoint You" shine through, and ended up sounding more Mansun than before. Which, perversely, goes to make the halfway-house that is Little Kix the Chester four's best album yet.