CD OF THE WEEK

THE HOURS Narcissus Road A&M ****

Like the real-life characters in lead track Ali in the Jungle, Antony Genn has come through near-impossible odds to make this startling, passionate debut. A former member of Joe Strummer's Mescaleros, Genn struggled for years with heroin addiction, and his biggest gig to date had been an impromptu appearance during Elastica's set at Glastonbury - stark naked and stoned. When Genn finally got clean, he realised that he needed to seize the day, and this album sees him and cohort Martin Slattery grabbing said 24-hour period by the scruff and squeezing every last drop of life from it.

Once you get past some of the more toe-curling lyrics of Ali in the Jungle ("Like Ludvig van/How I loved that man/Well, he went deaf/And didn't give a f***"), Narcissus Road reveals itself to be a smart, conscientious look at the modern world and all its failings, from the self-obsessed starlet of the title track to the self-deluding high-flyer in Icarus. Having spent so long on the dark side, Genn is fired up with a new evangelism, and the songs are driven by his punchy piano and fist-raising self-belief.

Back When You Were Good is addressed to a fellow artist who's lost his cred and abandoned his credo, while Love You More measures emotion on a typically male scale ("I love you more than my record collection/ . . . my football team/ . . . my Adidas trainers"). Far from being drippy, post-Coldplay ballads, I Miss You and Dive In are raw, emotional shards of melody, given weight by Genn's confrontational snarl, like Doves' Jimi Goodwin in pissed-off mode. The album's penultimate track, the walking bass-powered People Say, distills Genn's personal manifesto into a climactic, namechecking rant: "Who was the richest man in Vienna when Mozart was alive?/Who gives a fuck?"

After the noncommittal niceness of your Chris Martins, Gary Lightbodys and Tom Chaplins, it's a relief to hear a voice that refuses to cuddle up and get cosy while there is still inanity and idiocy to deal with. Like a man who has emerged from the darkness only to find everybody wearing blindfolds, Genn is on a mission to, in the words of his former boss's band, cut the crap. www.thehours.co.uk