When the DJ Sean Rowley created Guilty Pleasures as a way of rescuing perfectly decent but overlooked records from the dustbin of pop history, could anyone have expected it to inspire a rash of artists seemingly nostalgic for an age that never really existed?

Take the Feeling, five men who started out as a covers band playing to the hearty après-ski crowd. They unashamedly mined the forgotten soft-rock vein and single-handedly tried to rehabilitate the forgotten likes of Supertramp and Sailor. They couldn't exactly make them cool, but as they had the commercial wit to borrow heavily from the proven formulas of ELO and Queen, the Feeling sold plenty anyway (paving the way for Scouting For Girls and the Hoosiers, dagnamit).

The singer Dan Gillespie Sells, a tank-topped lad of unusual background and good to both his old mums, and his experienced crew became chart regulars - and deservedly. Two years later, they face music's trickiest situation - sustaining their debut success.

The pumping disco of the Berlin saga I Thought it Was Over is hardly Bowie's Heroes, but it makes for a great opener, perhaps the best tune here. The title track and the delightfully wet Without You, both deep and meaningless, aren't far behind. Spare Me is a Queeny ballad, the imprecatory Turn it Up nearer to that band's indecisive mid-Eighties lull, while the lush, touching Conor (or perhaps Connor - the sleeve and lyric sheet use different spellings) is unusually restrained on an album far more aggressive and rigorously structured than the epithet soft-rock implies.

The sprawling Don't Make Me Sad, almost a pomp-rock take on Chas'n'Dave's pub-friendly style, is as loose as it gets. The bonus tune We Can Dance presumably aspires to McCartney-esque jauntiness, but gets dangerously close to Chris De Burgh territory.

In fact its melody resembles nothing more than Abba's anachronistic bagpipe instrumental Arrival, last heard doing duty as the live theme tune of the Darkness, another act that arrived fully formed out of old parts. They had no idea how to deal with their luck and blew it with a confused (if catchy) second record that reeked of self-doubt, the last thing the rock audience wants. The Feeling have learnt that lesson, as the absurd consensus anthem Loneliness (they're against it) demonstrates.

Join With Us is clinical rather than cynical, but no buyer will feel short-changed, unless they are desperate for the unexpected. And that does not describe the target audience.

(Island)

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