PAUL SIMON
Surprise Warner Bros ****

Popular music is most often about the immediate and the instinctive. That is why it is popular - it grabs you and doesn't let go until it pales with repeated listening and you move on, leaving the song or the album to become a fond part of memory. Paul Simon is a popular singer/songwriter, one of the greatest of the last 40 years, and he operates by these rules. As such this album, his finest and certainly most challenging since Graceland, fulfills the first criteria of good popular music in that it does as it says on the packet: it surprises. So much so that there is a disconnect between preconceived notions of Simon and the one Brian Eno's angled and occasionally jumpy production delivers.

But is it a good or bad surprise? I had my doubts, but the more you listen the more you hear. And the more you hear the more this unlikely partnership makes sense. Simon's intellectual rigour and emotional fragility have been constants in his long career. He is angst central, constantly questioning, arrogant and vulnerable, occasionally at the same time. So it is here. The 11 tracks cover love and guilt, age and reflection, birth and responsibility, disaster and our place in this world.

Yet the beauty of this collaboration is that these big themes are reduced to pop songs, hummable fragments of delicious melody jumbled up in sound bubbles and complex rhythms carried by the shimmer of his ever-youthful voice - he is now 65 - and the sheen of the predictably impressive musicians. That said, this is not an easy record to love, and Eno is arguably heavy-handed at times, but give it time - it's worth it. www.paulsimon.com