The Bedroom tapes

She really should've called it The Big Chill.

Don't let the homely title fool you, Simon's first original album in six years is no bunch of basement recordings cranked out for the vain merriment of friends and family. Rather, it's a collection of bruised confessionals conceived in the heart of Martha's Vineyard. Salt air, open sores you know the rest.

Sonically though, Simon's spirit still dwells on the other American coast - she's the quintessential MOR songbird located somewhere left of Carole King and right of Ricki Lee Jones. Indeed, The Bedroom Tapes is a peculiar music room capable of simultaneously accommodating players of the thousand-dollar-an-hour calibre of drummer Steve Gadd and the progressively more eccentric Liam O' Maonlai on backing vocals and "balron". (Balron?!!)

Yet while Carly takes The Craft pretty damn seriously (as is borne out by the trick 'n' treat melodies and superior arrangements of 'So Many Stars') the cold heart of the subject matter is disintegration: of friendship, faith, fidelity and the body itself.

The latter is obviously the most traumatic. The singer underwent a masectomy during her hiatus from the mainstream, and the psychic and physical wounds are addressed here in songs such as 'I Forget' and 'Scar' ("It's after the knives and sutures and needles/I'm left with an arrow that points to my heart . .. . Lead with your spirit and follow, follow your scar"). Here, all the dirty little insecurities are exposed under the kind of ruthless scrutiny which separates the Jonis from the Jewels: "I said I'd been sick but was on the mend/I told him a few of the overall details/He said 'That's too bad'/And he's never called me again".

And again, on the heartily bitchy rebuke to backstabbing buddies 'We Your Dearest Friends', a sense of baby-boomers' betrayal, of loss and separation. Even the illicitly lovely opener 'Our Affair' ("There's nothing but a silky hope/That old opiate between me and you") is destined to soundtrack the latest retro-seventies wife-swapping flick.

The Bedroom Tapes isn't perfect, and Simon can frequently misjudge the tone of a tune (as in the schmaltzy Gershwin homage 'In Honor Of You (George)'). But as a model example of what happens when bitter sentiment meets sweet harmony, this'll do just fine.