Review from The Guitar Magazine:

In the three years since forming, Chester's Mansun have rifled through numerous wardrobe changes (nu-punk, glam, gaudy Mr Byrite crapness and more), churned out a string of eclectic non-album EPs (seven so far) and gone from, they say, 'not being able to even play' to supporting David Bowie and co-headlining T In The Park. The payback has been a fanbase that's large, yet so disparate that seemingly no-one admits to liking them.

Their Attack Of The Grey Lantern debut album, a number 1 in  February  1997,  proved Mansun's sound was equally hard to pinpoint, even if the scattergun guitars of Dominic Chad, hard-hit flourishes of drummer Andie Rathbone and Paul Draper's obtuse lyricism were anchored by a keen ear far a chart-friendly melody. That, of course, was only a debut.

The 70-minute Six is so complex it makes ...Grey Lantern sound like a four-to-the-floor pub rock knees-up. Here we have three 'movements' (Parts 1&2) separated by Tom 'Dr Who' Baker's spoken  interlude). Interwoven are references to - honest - Benjamin Hoff's book The Tao Of Pooh and also the drowning of Brian Jones (the Stones guitarist lived and died in Winnie The Pooh author AA Milne's old abode Cotchford Farm, Sussex).

The accompanying soundtrack - which pilfers rock's past with a ramraider's abandon - is again dominated by Dominic Chad's guitars, his burbling arpeggios, zappy solos and punky stabbed chords, all filtered through a huge spread of pedals and echoing Draper's bizarre lyrical notions every leap of the way. Like Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood, Chad is a player unhampered by any notion of how an electric guitar 'should' sound.

So though broadly a guitar rock LP, Six also touches on psychedelia (Television, Shotgun), new-wave shoutiness (Being A Girl), Tchaikovsky (Fall Out), theatrical opera (Witness To A Murder) even, occasionally, a pithy  pop  song (erm...). Fortunately, Six is as often entertaining as it is preposterous. The jury remains out on whether Mansun  are  geniuses or pretentious crackpots, but in the meantime they've fashioned an album that is simply astonishing.

(4/5) Richard Mann