ALBERTA Cross have the Seventies beards, Old Grey Whistle Test hair and stoner floral shirts; they have the lonesome ballads, the Crazy Horse and The Band guitars and the Crosby, Stills and Nash melodies; they have you thinking this must be a long-lost treasure newly re-discovered in Laurel Canyon.

They have you fooled, but in the best possible way, on this most promising mini-album.

Alberta Cross are an Anglo-Swedish alliance, alias Terry Wolfers and Petter Ericson Stakee, who recorded this supremely confident riff on classic country-rock in East London.

Like Squeeze (on Labelled With Love), The Rockingbirds and The Broken Family Band before them, they prove a British postcode is no bar to breaking hearts the American country way.

A different past, his own in Grant Lee Buffalo, still hangs its shadow over Grant-Lee Phillips on his fifth solo album, which slips beyond memory no matter how often you play its worn country and doomed rock. Strangelet - named after subatomic clusters of volatile matter - is a "record for strange times", and suitably puzzling itself, it says all it has to say in the first three tracks before fizzling out into a trio of T Rex pastiches and unfocused musing, despite the stellar presence of REM guitarist Peter Buck.

That opening trio, however, is full of brio on the Echo and The Bunnymen-echoing Runaway, the latterday U2 heart-on-the-sleeve drama of Soft Asylum (No Way Out), and the fated acoustic Americana of Fountain Of Youth, with its ever so pretty ukulele. Phillips is "longing for some sort of peace of mind"; too peaceful, alas, as Strangelet drifts off.