CD of the Week

DUKE SPECIAL Songs from the Deep Forest V2 ****

There's a new type of pop music in town. It's a little bit grandiose and cerebral, a little bit smart-arse and superior, a little bit camp and garish. Taking the nod from the likes of Scott Walker as distilled by Divine Comedy, Richard Swift and Rufus Wainwright, Belfast's Duke Special (aka Peter Wilson) deserves, well, special commendation for tackling an area that Wainwright (in particular) seems to have patented: a lithe, ambi/metro/boho/homo sexual groove that is equally sumptuous and intimate. Arctic Monkeys it ain't.

Of course, we're dealing with lush pop music here - strings, bells and whistles very much attached - and that kind of thing requires a keen intelligence to pull it off. Cue Duke Special's hair ropes swinging into view, and cue some of the best and smartest songs you'll hear this year. Placing your finger over the button marked "eccentric", however, won't get anyone very far these days, which is why it's a pleasure to say that not one of Special's songs come across as self-conscious or self-regarding. Tracks such as Wake Up Scarlett, Brixton Leaves, No Cover Up, Portrait, Ballad of a Broken Man, Something Might Happen and This Could Be My Last Day break the mould by virtue of their stirring, natural sensibilities. Elaborate, in other words, but nowhere close to the suffocating smugness of, say, Flaming Lips.

To paraphrase our Sheffield friends, Arctic Monkeys, on their win at this year's Mercury Music Prize, if this album doesn't win the next Choice Music Prize Award for the best Irish record of 2006, then someone had best call in the Special Branch - this Duke has been mugged. www.dukespecial.com