With a little too much synth strings and not enough colours on his disco-based palette Max Skiba's new album falls a little wide of the mark.

Max Skiba is clearly a fan of Chic. No bad thing, in Bernard Edwards, Chic had perhaps the greatest of all electric bass players with a matchless groove that's a worthy inspiration source. However, the rest of Skiba's disco-based pallette is a little limited: gentle, generic synth strings wash indiscriminately over seemingly everything; polite arpeggiated pianos flutter here and there; keyboard flutes pop up predictably and inoffensively.

In the end its slightly wishy washy pleasantness brings to mind the supposedly pacifying music one hears while waiting on hold for a human being at the other end of a telephone line. Max Skiba understands Bernard Edwards' genius; his homework now is to grasp Nile Rodgers, and move on from there. (Ambrose Fischer)