SOPHIA is not a girl but a melancholic muse by the name of Robin Proper-Sheppard, whose soul searching began with The God Machine and continues to blight him on his third solo album.

People Are Like Seasons is epic yet personal and intimate, in the Big Music vein of Mike Scott's Waterboys, although the maudlin mood owes more to The Cure and any number of miserable British misanthropes of the Eighties. Expanding upon the previously minimalist scope of his introspective songs, he has added pop detail to his brooding and intense dramas, be it on the opening brace of Oh My Love and Swept Back or the eight-minute Desert Song No. 2.

Even the outwardly jaunty Holidays Are Nice has a scorpion sting in its jealous tale.

Where Proper-Sheppard is all darkness, San Francisco's Beulah have always had a sunshine state of mind, until now. In the two years since their third psychedelically toasted album, The Coast Is Never Clear, the West Coast joy has left the building, along with the partners of four band members. Bad news? Oh no, Yoko is the sun sick, love-sick sound of Beulah in recovery, embracing the good, the bad and the ugly.

Updated: 08:57 Thursday, March 04, 2004