It is the greatest of pleasures to follow or rather – to experience the solo albums of Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner in the last ten years. Not that anything about him (or The Police) has ever been plastic, unpleasant or too sugary but with age or simply with artistic maturing, the man and the artist Sting have murged into an impressive line of folk tales of the misty North-Western English shore, tales of manly rise and fall.

And if ‘Songs from the Labyrinth’ was a Renaissance experiment (a successful one!), and ‘If On a Winter's Night...’ was the grand ghost-story Christmas album noone expected, then ‘The Last Ship’ is the next logical step – a classic, folklore-driven, silently bleusy and undountedly English, it is a radiophonic album that is about a hundred times better than anything in the charts this year.

And it comes as little surprise that (alike ‘Songs from the Labyrinth’ and ‘If On a Winter's Night...’) ‘The Last Ship’ comes out in October. This collection of silent, calm, narrative songs are perfect for your Autumn walk or your winter evening for they will never be hit singles in the modern, rather vulgar way. And even though they might be raunchy and even danceable (in The Pogues way) in their core the tracks are conservative, olden and wise as Sting himself. So simple and wonderful that there is little one could find wrong with them.

There’s acoustic guitar (mainly) and bass, but also accordion, violin, cello, traditional percussion tool  but main accent is still the trademark, soft, telling another story voice of Sting. Even guests like Brian Johnson (yup the AC/DC singer) and Jimmy Nail can’t take our attention off Sting’s stern silhouette, always looking at the horizon and striving for new (musical) frontiers.d we couldn’t really point out favourites here. For ‘The Last Ship’ is grand. And perfect. It’s that simple.