"Arclight" is not an easy album to review. For starters, it isn't easy to pin down a genre with any sense of certainty: rock, sure, but it jumps from guitar rock to electro-rock, passing through neuromanticism and into punk-rock and folk-rock and never quite seems to settle for longer than half a song. My first reaction to the new LP from Swedish rockers Silverbullit was "Woah, hang on, what just happened there?" - I was attempting to surf the web while listening to the album for the first time, and I had to keep stopping and checking that I was still listening to the same band. But once "Arclight" grabbed my attention I just had to sit down and pay attention to it.

"Arclight" starts well. Some mundane atmospherics and an exceedingly ordinary synth drum line unexpectedly turns out to be one of the stand out tracks on the album, Run. Run has a guitar riff like a U2 song with vocals that sound remarkably like Jeff Martin from the Tea Party until he starts yelling like a goth rocker about midway through the track, which then leads into a minute and a half of electro-rock. This is pretty indicative of "Arclight": every track reminds you of someone else. Often multiple someone elses, and the rest of the album is just as schizophrenic as Run.

Only Gold, the second track on "Arclight", is what Depeche Mode would have sounded like if they'd been a rock band. Following this is Buddy, sounding like the bastard offspring of Rocket Science and the Vines. Kite is about as electro as rock is able to get without turning fusion, but the lyrical style brings to mind Brit-pop, a la Simian. Call It In is a dead ringer for the folky pastoral-rock Pink Floyd were knocking out as filler on "Atom Heart Mother" and "Meddle", right down to the echoey guitar, ringing phone and musique concrete. Winter Coat is lyrically the Doors but the chorus is something all together different. Blood is what the Sisters of Mercy would have written for the soundtrack to Electric Dreams. Once Upon a Time sounds like Devo's goth-rock side project. CloudWay has absolutely nailed Muse. If the Foo Fighters ever decide to cover another Gary Numan track, it will sound like Seconds. Boof brings you in mind of Saint Etienne in one of their less sleepy moods until the guys from Silverbullit start singing. I Promise You can't decide whether it is Filter or the Eels.

So what does all this mean? Well, it could very easily have meant that "Arclight" is an inconsistent, derivative piece of work, full of interesting songs that nevertheless fail to achieve cohesion as an album. It should mean that "Arclight" does not bear repeated listening, and that while it makes an interesting curio it would never make it into your regular rotation. It should do, and I can't for the life of me figure out why it doesn't, but in fact "Arclight" is a frightfully good album. The first listen can be a little disorienting, but by the time you hit the last third of the LP there is an over-arching heavy electro-rock drone that seems to pull everything together, and on repeated listens "Arclight" seems actually quite coherent. I suspect some very clever production is largely responsible for this cohesiveness, with a few tracks leading quite well into the next, such as Call It In, which segues quite improbably into the much more electronic Winter Coat.

It also helps that the album is so well bookended. Run is the perfect opening track for this album, leading with clichéd electro-atmospherics into well-written, smoothly produced rock, and I Promise You is suitably epic, and sufficiently complex to adequately bring such a varied album to a close. And unlike most albums that way in at under an hour, "Arclight" seems neither rushed, nor abbreviated. It almost feels like a journey, as if Silverbullit are exploring either their own musical influences or else a random smattering of what has gone before in an attempt to define and expand their own sound, which they then demonstrate in the final track. Having not listened to more than a a couple of tracks from this outfit before, I can't speak to how representative this album is of their work, but "Arclight" certainly feels like the sort of album a band releases right before they start to release their best work, when they really nail down their sound, but also explore its boundaries and its limits. It will be interesting to see whether Silverbullit are struck by the muse sufficiently to release another album early in 2005. If they do, it could well be a very fine album.

Improbably there really are no weak tracks in this release, there is no filler. Each track is different, and strongly written. Different people will have different favourites, but for mine Run and I Promise You are still the defining tracks. Defining, and indicative, but not representative - "Arclight" is far too eclectic for any track to be truly representative.

Apart from the obvious entertainment value of spotting which artists Silverbullit sound like on which track, "Arclight" is the sort of album that you can come back to repeatedly, precisely because it is such a musical buffet. It can keep you interested. And against expectations it is far from derivative: it is more like a musical collage, mixing unexpected snippets and styles to create something new, and there is still an unmistakable hint of Silverbullit running through it all.