"After the damp squib that half-bro Jules' career turned out to be - and considering the band IMA's collaboration with Yoko Ono on Rising - it's safe to say that few people have been holding their breath for the first opus proper by Beautiful Boy Sean Lennon.

Which makes it all the happier duty for me to report that Into the Sun is rather a fine record - a tad slight, a touch winsome, but full of excellent things: lilting bossa-nova ballads, Beckesque bedsit dirges, even (and why not?) a brace of Beatlesish pop gems, all cooed in a homely teen tenor that's close to the faux-fey John L. of say, "Julia."

Bearing the Grand Royal seal of hip and produced by Lennon's well-cool inamorata Yuka (Cibo Matto) Honda, Into the Sun sounds like Antonio Carlos Jobim scrunched into Sparklehorse: in other words, smooth and soothing with enough left-field dippiness to keep the brain happy.

"Queue" is a peach of a Fabs/Beach Boys hybrid, with backward guitars and a "Strawberry Fields" mellotron. "Breeze" is swaying Jobim with a genius electric guitar counter-melody on its gorgeous chorus. "Bath Tub" and "Cowboy Song" are Beck sung by an Anglo-Japanese Eldra DeBarge. And "Photosynthesis," driven by a cool Horace Silver groove, is a more than credible helping of "jazz." All of these (and more) bode extremely well for Sean's future."