Now, I have leaned to come at artists like this from a completely unbiased standpoint as home studios can produce both superb material and unbelievable rubbish. Xelsior, luckily, is in the former category.

I should say straight away that Sean scores heaps of points in my book by writing and recording all his own music and also playing all his own instruments - drums, guitar and keyboard. He is a one-man band (and I don't mean those guys walking around shopping centres in the 70's with cymbals on their heads). Sean describes his sound as Pop Rhythm/electronica, which is a fairly good assessment.

The CD contains information on the tracks if you play them in your PC, which was one of the plus points of the interface, and it was nice to be able to follow the lyrics on screen as I listened. Influences include Michael Jackson, the artist once more known as Prince, and "anyone who's ever made a song I like". Fair enough, then.

I'm not sure if these influences come through so much in the music. Michael Jackson was one of my favourite artists in the 80's (not so much now), and Xelsior's music seems a little slow in tempo compared to him - but I can see the Prince influences here and there. Whoever has influenced this CD, however, it is well produced and full of top tunes in the Pop genre - but certainly in the UK, I would imagine it appealing to people who like the pop of the 80's rather than the more modern style.

It's difficult to sum up "Kriminal Kutz" as each song is a little different from the last. "Kriminal", for example, is a funky rock mix which I thoroughly enjoyed whereas "Kryme" is slower and more mid-80's pop. My favourite song on the CD is "Destiny" which is absolutely typical early modern pop in the style of just about every artist you can remember from 12 years ago. Personally, I enjoyed it - and if you like to chill out to relaxed pop grooves at the end of a hard day, this is for you. On the other hand, if you like to go down the local nightclub several times a week and smash your brains out to the latest club mixes, you might want to give it a miss.

Check out Xelsior on MP3.com at http://www.mp3.com/xelsior

"Kriminal Kutz" is the first CD I have had the pleasure of reviewing from the MP3.com label - which gives me a chance to digress for a moment and comment on this relatively new service for budding musicians. D.A.M, or Digital Automatic Music, is the posh name that MP3.com have given their system, and according to the inlay on the "Kriminal Kutz" CD I could expect CD Audio which can be played back on any CD player (Gee, thanks) and a Multimedia section containing photos, artist info, lyrics and MP3s. This multimedia extravaganza, it said, would appear on Windows and Macintosh platforms when I inserted the CD. Well, sort of. Windows loaded the interface as promised, but my iMac stayed silent until I loaded it's CD player and played the CD myself - it doesn't quite do what it says on the can, as they say.

To be brutally honest, I actually found the whole experience intensely irritating. The DAM interface (sic) wasn't as easy to use as the Windows Media Player in Windows ME, and put up an advertisement for MP3.com and the Macromedia player whenever I closed it that stayed on the screen for 6 seconds. Not good, guys. On top of this, the interface appeared in three separate windows which could all be closed separately (this just confused me - I had to find out which one would close the interface entirely). Nothing highlighted when I clicked on it, so I didn't know that anything was happening until I discovered that I had to double-click the song titles - which it totally out of phase with my Windows set-up which is set for single-click like on the Internet. But the worst element for me was the fact that the interface somehow managed to totally bypass the in-built CD Player of Windows - there was no option I could find to just have the CD load into the Windows player when I inserted it if I didn't like the D.A.M. interface. So a big thumbs down to the front end, I'm afraid - but this is a criticism of the MP3.com CD format and not of Xelsior.