YOU would have been forgiven for thinking Space have got lost in space.

It seems a distant era now when the band - always never far away from the adjectives "quirky" and "Scouse" - were a permanent fixture in the late 1990s charts, when their string of oddball pop singles, such as Female Of The Species and Neighbourhood, saw them unexpectedly thrust to success on the Britpop wave.

As with Pulp and Blur, there was always a dark underbelly beneath their music-hall chirpiness, and yes, disillusionment, illness, rehab and record company wranglings have all played their part in the band's recent years in rock limbo - indeed most people probably assumed they had long split up.

Having lost guitarist Jamie Murphy, and parted company with major label Gut Records, the older and wiser Space are back in action on their own terms - but you can't help thinking their time has been and gone. Wisely, Space are now after cult status and creative freedom, not a return to chart success. So Suburban Rock'N'Roll is not the embarrassment it could have been.

They have lost much of the irritating cartoonishness of old, while Tommy Scott can still extract a dark kitchen-sink melodrama of a pop song from the surreal side of everyday life.

Musically, there's hints of Squeeze, The Specials and John Lennon, the occasional cinematic ballad, and outbreaks of horror-movie sound effects.

The title track, Zombies and Hitchhiking hit the mark, Hell's Barbecue sounds like a nightmare musical and Paranoid Teen dabbles in glam rock. But there's not really anything here to win over new or casual listeners.

If there is still a secret hardcore of Space fans out there, they'll be very happy, but Suburban Rock'N'Roll isn't going to carve a new space age for Space in 2004.

Updated: 08:38 Thursday, March 11, 2004