Synkronized

There's no point in beating around the bush here: Jay Kay has to be one of the most loathed men in pop. Put it down to a perceived smugness, that spritzer-eating grin, a penchant for posh autos, a celebrity girlfriend - anything but the music.

And on that subject, this listener never cared for the guy's records much, suspecting the Jam guilty of promulgating the kind of deboned, punch-drunk white funk (a term which indicates attitude rather than pigment) once favoured by turkey-nodding musos on The Waterfront in the mid-'80s.

However, Synkronized is not as bad as all that. Indeed there's enough to crow about on tracks like 'Canned Heat' and 'Black Capricorn Day', simmering Moog-enhanced grooves that evoke Sly Stone, Stevie Wonder, Earth Wind And Fire and The Jackson 5. Indeed, if you want a totally top-of-the-head reference (and one for which JK would hardly thank me), it's the kind of jazz-funk/r 'n' b routines Maria Doyle-era Hothouse Flowers used to deal in, before they got lost in the Celtic Tweelight.

So what's the problem? There ain't no songs, that's what. Hot chops, snappy scat sessions, fetching retro textures, yes, but in terms of tuneful grit, Jamiroquai are running on the same empty which afflicts Prince at his most over-prolific and anaemic. Three listens down this line, and your reporter was none the wiser as to the purpose of tunes like 'Butterfly' and the juvenile 'Soul Education', other than to elicit a vague twitching somewhere south of the navel. Which, in itself is a fair enough pre-requisite for funk soul-brother music, one which has stood to records by JB and Isaac Hayes, but only when bulked up by some substantial lyrical, melodic and rhythmical roughage.

So, while you can chin-rub and goatee-tug knowingly at the kool Cuban touches on tracks like 'Supersonic', or even the Schubert steals in 'King For A Day', taken in its entirety, this collection has nothing to declare. Jamiroquai, on their fourth album, have taken the Fifth.