★★☆☆☆
Back in the Nineties the Lighthouse Family cleaned up with their super-smooth brand of dinner party soul, with singer Tunde Baiyewu’s plangent tones and composer Paul Tucker’s gently uplifting keyboard melodies making an unobtrusive accompaniment to sun-dried tomato and goat’s cheese starters across the land.
They are back after an 18-year gap, and not much has changed. Vaguely inspirational, ultimately banal messages of hope about your troubles going away or finding your salvation are repeated again and again until they sound meaningful, and one piece of Radio 2-friendly, strings-laden pop melancholia follows another.
It is all very soothing and soporific, but then so are sleeping pills, and too much of either is not a good idea. (Polydor)