Number of the best: Chester four-piece's follow-up to Number One debut, Attack Of The Grey Lantern

THIS is the most extraordinary album you'll hear all year. Not the best. Not the worst. Just the most extraordinary. It is also the most ridiculous, confusing, complicated,  over-reaching, frustrating,   inventive, hyperactive,  surprising and liberating record to yet appear from the post-britpop stable. How the fuck Mansun got here I doubt anyone knows; least of all Mansun. In the past, we've put them down as chancers, interpreting their inability to settle on a proper look or characteristic sound as the squirming of a band cluelessly desperate to belong. We were seriously wrong. Judging by Six, Mansun are in far bigger trouble than a trouser-and-chorus crisis. Read those titles: "Negative", "Inverse Midas", "Anti Everything", "Cancer"...And hear Paul Draper squeal, "Life is a compromise anyway," "l'm emotionally raped by Jesus"... Punk angst, right? Or Goth? Wrong again. You can forget your Radioheads and your UNKLEs. This is Prog. Real Prog as in Progressive Rock. As in banned by the Style Police since 1975.

Sorry about this but to understand Six, it is imperative you understand the impetus of Prog before all the capes  and  jodhpurs  and  lasers reduced it to a pantomime featuring brickies in perms and tights. Frog was born back in the late Sixties out of frustration with the modes of music available. It was an attempt to ape the classical, to stretch the dumb pop format to articulate myriad emotions within one work - an attempt to express something beyond boy-meets-girl; often an attempt to express the inexpressible. In that, it often over-reached itself and laid itself open to charges of conceit, overindulgence, pomposity and general absurdity.

Hello, Mansun. Listening to Six, there can be no doubt in anyone's mind that Paul Draper is pretty fucked up. And torn between that strange, unsettling showbiz imperative to exorcise his demons and make an exhibition of himself, Draper's LP is equal parts baffling, unbearably over-blown and astonishingly beautiful.  "Cancer",  for instance, travels from the deepest, darkest urguent depths of Kurt Cobain's most wretched  nightmare  to some gorgeously uplifting Pink Floyd skyscraping  guitar.  Six itself journeys the whole of pop history from Supertramp to Supergrass and back again, partly trying to locate a voice for its own obsessions, partly showing off.

At its very worst, Six revisits all the awful muse excesses that punk was supposed to have booted to death. "Fall Out", for example, begins with a synth picking out the theme to The Sugar Plum Fucking Fairy, as if to say, "Look how clever we are," only to shimmy into the most wonderful pastiche of David Bowie  circa  Hunky Gory. It could be a piss-take if only it didn't sound so earnest, so troubled, so necessary.

Perhaps the best way to approach Six (and it is one hell of a struggle to get all the way through it in one sitting, even though it has been thoughtfully divided into, ahem, Part 1, Interlude and Part 2) is to approach it as a foolhardy act of bravery. Here is a band who could be the envy of all pre-millennial pop groups, who can toss out singles like "Legacy" and "Being A Girl" which effortlessly combine the teenage tendency to suicidal depression with a grand heroic bluster with more poise and poignancy than anything the current Manics could dream of ("Nobody cares when you're gone," indeed) and yet they choose to do this: they take a harpsichord and a female opera singer and create a passable Michael Nymanesque chamber piece only to haul in Tom Baker (the Dr Who Tom Baker) to read lines like: "All my life what I mistook for friendly pats on the back were really the hands that pushed me further and further down .. ." You will hear nothing else so daft, ever.

I honestly don't know whether Six will turn out to be a life-changer or an object of universal ridicule. All I know is that it's never boring, which is saying something in this day and age. And that Paul Draper, he's some kind of genius. Hope he gets better soon.

(5/5) Steve Sutherland