The album showed Bedrock to be skilful magpie collectors and observers and a cunningly versatile team of songwriters At their most obvious they went larkily after traditional English preoccupations such as sunbathing and Sunday afternoons But the albums real strength lay in the gentle melancholy depths it plumbed on tracks such as So Low a gorgeous unfurling tune loosely hung around the theme of meteorology and To the Brink a ballad that allowed no smirking at the back The beauty of New Life is its consistently skyhigh quality  16 tracks with absolutely no filler remains an unsurpassed record in the era of loiteringly long CDs