Catatonia: "International Velvet" (Blanco Y Negro)

While Louise Wener from Sleeper has been beleaguered by bad record sales and poor concert attendances, Cerys from Catatonia is waking up to a bright, successful New Year. The Welsh band has smashed into the singles charts at Number Three with Mulder And Scully, and the whole country has heard and liked the throaty, lusty voice of Cerys Matthews, Britpop's new "it" girl. International Velvet is Catatonia's coming-out album, and it's full of bright, mischievous tunes. Game On playfully outlines Cerys's own go-for-broke philosophy with lines like "No clever clevers can dissuade/ From tougher substance I was made". Things get more persuasive on I Am The Mob, when she glibly reveals, "I put horses' heads in people's beds/ When duty calls, gonna bust some balls." And on Road Rage, Cerys races headlong into love with all the gusto of a charging bull. OK, lady, you win; now please take your stiletto out of my nostril. It's not all cult TV and film references and tongue-in-cheek topicality, however; there's the softcentred Johnny Come Lately, which sees Cerys's voice shift from sandpaper to velvet in one emotional swing, and the inward-looking Goldfish And Paracetamol, a fisheye-lens vignette of pharmaceutical despair. The politics of passion are addressed in songs like Strange Glue, My Selfish Gene and Why I Hate One Night Stands, Cerys getting it off her chest with a mixture of kitten's purr and lion's roar; in contrast, Don't Need The Sunshine is sung in a resigned, unaccented style. The mood is once again lifted by the title track, with its winding, Welshlanguage lyrics, and the wry, raucous chorus of "Every day when I wake up/I thank the Lord I'm Welsh." Vive la difference.