Three years ago, he discovered Oasis's Definitely Maybe, a tape he could play in his Ford Mondeo, and feel good about it. He still had it, he told himself.

And best of all, he listened to the same band as his son.

Yes, pity him. It's been a lean three years. After finding their common ground, he and his son went their separate ways. His son - into The Prodigy. He himself, like a recidivist, back into Simply Red.

There has not been much brilliance in the world of Britpop. A lot of hype and just a handful of good albums. Despite Oasis still being around, there has been something of a drought.

Radio One's The Net reports on Embrace's album launch

Enter Embrace. With a name that sounds sadly like a third rate teenage girl band, and an arrogance seemingly modelled on Noel Gallagher's, but without the charm.

Embrace have been telling the pop world for a long just how great they really are, and it is to someone's credit that they were not promptly binned for that alone. Now their debut album The Good Will Out is released, and we can judge for ourselves.

Initial impressions

Initial reaction has been mostly adulatory. NME said the album had "impassioned emotional magnitude", and labelled it "one of the great albums of the past decade". The Guardian said it was outstanding, and most of the press followed, although The Observer bucked the trend, trashing it wholeheartedly.

But make no mistake, there are touches of genius in this album. The band's biggest hit so far, All You Good Good People, sounds more impressive each time it is re-recorded, and this version is epic.

Orchestral manoeuvres

Similarly, Come Back to What You Know, once it leaves its painful dirge-like opening, plays elegantly alongside its orchestral backing, and gives an impression of being large enough to justify the band's arrogance.

The ballads which are grouped together at the end of the album balance the volume and scale of the earlier songs - one critic said few more beautiful sounds would be heard this year. The title track, which is the closing song, should become the album's defining success, for all the ambition of All You Good Good People.

And yet between the big songs and the ballads are several more conventional common or garden Britpop tracks whose main purpose uncomfortably seems to be to bring up the numbers.

Not a natural tip

The one exception in this category is You've Got to Say Yes, which has more echo of Oasis than any other track on the album, effectively capturing the edge that made Definitely Maybe.

Lead singer Danny McNamara does not have the kind of voice one would automatically tip for the top. Nasal and slightly whining, it does nevertheless seem strangely unstrained.

It is not entirely clear quite how they have done it, but Embrace seem to have found a way to make the listener feel they are hearing something 'important'.