After Un’s underwhelming reception, Dan Black might be this month’s old news. But it would have been foolish not to have high hopes for the smart-sampling Londoner’s solo debut. Standout track ‘Hypntz’, Black’s nifty cover of Notorious BIG’s ‘Hypnotize’, blazed a red-hot trail through the blogosphere last year, getting a host of critics all hot under the collar with its tank-tight synching of Rihanna’s ‘Umbrella’ drums and the anti-hitting vocal melody borrowed from the BIG man. Unfortunately BIG’s estate demanded a rewrite of the song’s lyrics before the official release on Un, hence the presence of new opening track ‘Symphonies’, essence intact, but minus "the hooligans in Brook-lyn".Black’s dancy laptronica manages to recall Jay Z, Prince and Sigur Ros, a tough scalene to circle for any one-man band, but while tracks like ‘Hypntz’ flagged up Black’s production savvy, Un reveals a myriad shards of sledgehammer splicing. Meandering pop track ‘Wonder’ sounds like Outkast’s ‘Hey You’ shot through with Liam Gallagher’s nasal drone at double speed, while ‘U + Me=’ shakily navigates African percussion, nursery rhyming, and a soaring r’n’b hook. Massive let-downs ‘Let Go’ and ‘Cocoon’, soporific soppy fillers, have a poke at Thom Yorke but don’t get much further than Daniel Bedingfield’s piano ballad ‘If you’re not the One’.Still, there are flashes of gold amid the over-produced chaff. When a run of the mill tween booty shaker slips into a fully-fledged symphony on ‘Alone’, or when the ‘Devil Woman’ riff sneaks onto Mylo-esque disco number ‘Pump my Pumps’; with the sexy snaky cool of ‘Yours’ ”“ Justin Timberlake, with spikes on ”“ and the throbbing ‘I Love Life’ ”“ Lady Gaga via The Streets - you can’t but bless Dan Black’s filthy little cotton socks.The quasi-philosophical musings on endless desire, lonely eyes, white sheets and broken beats, sometimes poignant, inevitably slip into mawkish navel gazing. ‘Life Slash Dreams’ mantra "Life is life, dreams are dreams, and I’m floating somewhere in-between" isn’t one any of us needs to hear and would be served best by a gang of white-suited Irish boys crooning at a pier-end. Only on these repetitious Prozac-paced tracks does Black’s wearisome whining draw more attention to itself than it should. If only he’d kept to the short, sharp and high-octane, Un might just have been in. 62%Dan Black on Myspace