ONE Dove flew off to who knows where, after one blissful album of chilled dub pop, then one long disappearance into a Dot on the horizon.

Serene siren Dot Allison returned in 1999 with the sunset musings of the slow-burning Afterglow, and now the Scot's brooding songs move slower still on the alienating We Are Science, a title rightly suggestive of bleak experimentation in a dark music laboratory.

Re-inventing herself for a third time, she forms a lab-coat alliance with Two Lone Swordsmen's Keith Tinniswood: she sings with a haunting Nico allure; he supplies spooky, sinister ambience with his computer box of techno tricks. Those in the fashionable know call this austere palette "electro-clash"; I hear a new century Yazoo with ennui but, alas, without the hit singles.

In vogue but too beige, this is style-magazine music for a space-age waiting room.

Updated: 15:53 Thursday, May 30, 2002