ELECTRIC GUITAR!!!! I swear I just heard an electric guitar! On WARP RECORDS!!! Roll over Mira Calix and tell The Aphex Twin the news. Admittedly, it wasn't a huge swathe of powerchords but I'm sure it was there. It still feels strange when one hears the decidedly human sounds of Broadcast on Sheffield's home to all things wibbly, bleepy and downright dissonant. Hey, they've even called their new L.P. The Noise Made by PEOPLE in case we had them down as a bunch of faceless technoheads. Broadcast then - too fleshly to appeal to the hardcore car alarm aficionados, too glacial to appeal to the pop kids, too intellectual for the Oasis/Travis/Stereophonics axis (but so are Aqua) - just who the hell are they trying to impress? On the strength of 1997's Work and Non-Work the blindingly obvious answer is of course…Stereolab fans. The Noise Made by People doesn't do anything to drag Broadcast out of their Stereolab copyists pigeonhole (they even thank Tim and Laetitia in the credits), but listen carefully and you'll notice something quite remarkable. Have you spotted it yet?…Yes, that's it…this album is actually better than anything the 'Lab have done for some considerable time. There's none of the self-indulgent 20-minute krautrockery which can make their peers' stuff such hard going. The Noise…is a whole bunch of beautiful noises, some made by people, some synthetic, all distilled into 12 discreet chunks of loveliness spread across just 45 minutes. Some of these tracks (Come On Let's Go, current single Papercuts) sail terrifically close to the sparkling waters where the regular pop songs live. Others (Minus One, You Can Fall) are happier dwelling in the murky rock pools where the kiddies never play but are no less beautiful. All of them are perfect in their own special way. They begin, they do something that makes you swoon for a few minutes then they stop - just like a real pop album but without the cheesy grins.

The Noise Made by People is not destined to be the soundtrack to a luvved-up summer in Agia Napa, nor will it find itself being bellowed from the terraces of football stadia. It will not be welcomed with open arms by lovers of cold, soulless electronica. Gentle reader, it is up to you to give this delicate slip of a disc a nice warm place to live.

Mark Wainwright