Six years after the Wild Swans first concocted ashor-lived total pop experience with 'Revolutionary Spirit' they're still looking for that vital essential ingredient which they briefly and unwittingly held for an instant. 'Bringing Home the Ashes' is somewhere between pop and pomposity with every step perfect, every hair in place and every beat, just where it should be. But there's very little behind the facade of production technique that could be called soul, nothing that inspires or excites once the cover art has been looked over.

The Wild Swans take themselves very seriously. 'Bringing...' addresses itselfto nothing less than the idea of England: the fair isle of Albion is the subject of this musical discourse - its founding ideals, its myths and its divisions. The problem is they can't think of a single interesting or illuminating thing to say about the place. Vaguely poetic strains waft around like romantics in a perfumed garden whilst we're given glimpses of basic anthropologicl texts and pseudo mysterious twaddle. "World War and revolution / The heart in the heart of / England can never die," quoth the leeve notes with as much original thought as a Robert Elms novel. That there's some trancecendental ideal of nationhood above and beyond the people who live in a given geographical area is at best laughbly ridiculous. In fact , the whole of 'Bringing... fails to say anything as exact and articulate about this bitter little island as a single Smiths or The The song: this isn't th place where some shared consciousness bonds people of different backgrounds and colours, its the place where pensioners are raped and hearts are being ripped from the Welfare State. Nothing green or pleasant about that. John Tague (5)