IF you can't take the traffic jams of modern life any more, and wish to retreat to woodland isolation, take Midlake's wonderfully wistful second album with you.

Listening to the soft Seventies wave of Fleetwood Mac, America, Joni Mitchell and especially Neil Young in Denton, smalltown Texas, songwriter Tim Smith imagined himself in the troubled head of the mysterious Van Occupanther, a lonely scientist ostracised by his village.

This was to be the springboard for Smith's outsider reflections on nature, the ebb and flow of the seasons, the old values of honest graft, the timeless frustrations of forlorn love and the tradition of building shelter for the winter.

The trials and lamentations are all Van Occupanther's; the listening pleasure will be all yours.

The pastoral airs of Midlake are matched by the quieter moments of Brakes - notably If I Should Die Tonight, the pedal-steel melancholia of Mobile Communication and the hushed finale of No Return - on the second short, sharp release from the ad-hoc offshoot of British Sea Power and Electric Soft Parade.

Their transfer from Brighton to Nashville may have shifted their music up country, but Eamonn Hamilton and Alex and Tim White have retained the jabbing shocks and art-punk irreverence of their caustic debut on the deranged Spring Chicken, thrashing Cease Or Desist and 66-second burn of Porcupine Or Pineapple?

These Beatific Visions are happy, sad, mad/not mad: a bipolar record in other words.