Vocalist David McAlmont and guitarist Bernard Butler made an odd couple--McAlmont, dreadlocked and openly gay, Butler floppy-fringed and guitar-obsessed. However, The Sound Of McAlmont & Butler stood singularly out in the mid-Nineties for its grandiosity and ambition. McAlmont's falsetto vocals, whipped up into a sweet-and-sour cream of estrangement and infatuation, found a perfect vehicle in Butler's arrangements. His use of big guitars and epic strings on "Yes" and "Disappointment" reminded of a lost pop tradition harking back to Phil Spector and Al Green's "Hi-Sound" of the early Seventies. An antique pop sound to be sure but one which could have been developed in a Nineties context. Sadly, however, the pair duly fell out after this album, which stands as a single glimpse of what might have been. --David Stubbs