ALL songs are love songs, and if they are not, they are out-of-love songs.

Just ask David Gedge, the Leeds chronicler of kitchen-sink romance. In 1997 he put The Wedding Present to bed and conducted his relationship with Sally Murrell as a series of love letters in their increasingly dark duo project Cinerama. Alas their 14-year relationship ended in late 2002 before reaching the wedding present stage.

Gedge settled in Seattle, where Yorkshire's blue-collar Keats took up his fountain pen to write Take Fountain, re-adopting the nom de plume of The Wedding Present with a bunch of hired hands and old Weddoes' guitarist Simon Cleave to serve as his Greek chorus.

Gedge leads off his thank-you list on the album sleeve with Sally, his muse for his broken body of songs as he conducts a cathartic clear-out in sympathy with Bob Dylan's Blood On The Tracks. Twenty years ago, Gedge wrote of adolescent affairs of the heart, a world of unrequited crushes and petty jealousies. Now, even more bewildered by love's complexities, his milieu of misery is middle-aged heartburn and romantic friction.

The trademark guitars can still get in a strop, but mariachi horns and orchestral flourishes evoke Cinerama's widescreen dramas. Gedge's caustic humour is rampant too, typified by his decision to release Take Fountain on Valentine's Day.

Where his album cover fades to foggy grey, Blackburn's Tompaulin peer Into The Black and find the blues. In the wake of Cinerama's final curtain, here are the dark-humoured northern romanticists to take their place, albeit that their lullabies look to America's Mazzy Star, Galaxie 500 and Joy Zipper for melancholic, introspective inspiration. Lyrics echo The Beautiful South's boy-girl spats on Useless and 3 In The Morning and elsewhere recall Jarvis Cocker's sharply detailed melodramas, as the world-weary Stacey McKenna and Jamie Holman explore desire, hurt and doubt long into night. Swooning and gorgeous, it is better still for the Mary Chain's Jim Reid re-surfacing for a husky cameo on Seams.

Updated: 09:06 Thursday, February 17, 2005