This is one hell of a long album - 2 full CDs and 11 songs, each one about the length of your average ketamine trip.

I approached this debut with some trepidation - it could so easily have trudged the same largely uninspiring track as his collaborations with Julian Cope recorded under the Queen Elizabeth moniker. The two Queen Elizabeth albums to date have so nearly achieved so much but instead became side-tracked by their own navels. Queen Elizabeth's failing is that they appear to indulge themselves in lengthy live improvisations without actually being able to improvise with any confidence beyond the bromidic - the spirit may be willing but the ability has buggered off home for a bit of a kip. Not so for I, Thighpaulsandra which aims for a similar landing pad, but achieves its goals through pleasing arrangements and lush overdubs and is entertaining at the very least. At best it can blow your head off.

The songs are long, the ambience is highly varied and the production is marvellous. The majority of the album is so perfect that the flaws merely underline just how good the good bits are. That said, I would dearly love to send "We The Descending" packing, right back to the Tears For Fears album on which it belongs. I, Thighpaulsandra is clearly the work of an highly inspired individual, and I am puzzled as to why such drearily formulaic vocal melodies as those used on "We The Descending" dare to show their face. They simply do not fit the opulence of their surroundings, and for once I, Thighpaulsandra commits the sin that it inexorably avoids elsewhere and becomes merely boring. Fortunately it doesn't last for long and is calmly escorted from the building by the gorgeously serene "Limping Across The Sky" which opens like a segment from The KLF's Chill Out with no end.

The Krautrock influence is littered all over the place - "Michel Publicity Window" or "Limping Across The Sky" are strange meshes of early, fiery Tangerine Dream and later synth-scape-era Klaus Schultz. Elsewhere you hear fine echoes of Cluster. The closing "Beneath The Frozen Lake Of Stars" (an out-take from the Queen Elizabeth sessions which suffers from similar drawbacks as the rest of the Queen Elizabeth material) sounds something along the lines of what Can may have sounded like had each member been relieved of the use of one arm.

Minor criticisms apart, this is a cracking, crackling album, a cruise through the gloriously dented psyche of the man with the greatest name in rock history (with the possible exception of Crass' Phil Free).