The well-crafted, at times over-polished acoustic pop song, immaculately recorded, with everything in its place. No ugly sounds reeking of contemporary life. No bullshit, if you like, just the beautiful or emotional side of the world. You'll have to admit almost no-one makes them like this anymore, very few people dare to: Paddy, Boo, Roddy, Stephen (Duffy), Martin (Stephenson), maybe Paul (ha!) and a very few other artists who started their careers more than fifteen years ago. And you could even object to some of these names as they have changed their aesthetics over the years (and perhaps Aztec Camera were always too punky for inclusion… right, I'll replace Roddy with Ricky). The Miracle Mile, who couldn't even be considered an Eighties band since they strarted putting out records in the past decade, are perhaps the most obstinate purveyors of that dying art, the Eighties soul-pop song. They're undoubtedly very good at it, and Slow Fade, their fourth album, is yet further proof of their ability in creating (or recreating?) that particular brand of popular music. It's a slightly quieter work than 1997's Candids, you won't find semi-rockers like "Full Circle" or "Shoot The Moon" here - it's mostly mid-tempo or slow ballads. But that's not a problem -in fact, some of the best moments on Slow Fade are short acoustic pieces like the title track and "Jim", which have a sense of wonder and suspension heightened by little structural deviations from the norm, all the more apparent in a "conventional" record like this (on "Jim", for example, when the drums come in after the chorus, that melody played by the doublebass and then by the guitar, where you'd expect a second vocal verse). Another structural oddity is "The Duty of Stars", a song that starts in the middle, goes nowhere, ends with a voiceover but still makes sense. Other attention-grabbing bits include "God Knows", which sounds like an Elvis Costello number both in the composition and the vocal delivery, and "Starwatching", oddly reminiscent of Crowded House's "Fall At Your Feet". But the best songs are probably "Blue Sea White Dog", with its lovely outward turn from a humdrum verse to a heart-warming chorus, and "Guggenheim". That song is a perfect example of what you're going to face if you meddle with the Miracle Mile. It's a description of a romantic meeting in New York, replete with references to the Fifth Avenue, Central Park and Frank Lloyd Wright - the zoo, the skating childrens' cries and the empty carousels - then Trevor Jones imagines how will it feel in forty years time to remember "through the tears" a great moment like that. Believe it or not, it works. It may have you grinning on a first listen, but then you get it and it wins - a nice, simple, perhaps sugary, and touching, song.