Seems to be the month for some of the greatest to release a new album, Bush, Bacharach and Wonder. Always nerve wracking because you just don't want them to have lost it.

Manged to listen to Wonders A Time To Love CD whilst going to and from Oxford yesterday. I first wish to set the scene. I was in my teens when I first heard 'My Cherie Amour', not his best I agree but even this track made me think that there was 'something different' out there. Then I heard Innervisions and never looked back. I have everything he has done and even rate The Secret Life of Plants as one of my faves even though it had mixed reviews. I saw him at Wembley for The Hotter Than July tour.

So when I Just Called To Say I Love You hit the charts, it was all over for me I'm afraid. And working in hospital radio where it gets requested almost every week, doesn't help.

SO I still had a bright enough torch to buy the CD outright before I read any reviews and I am not dissapointed.

Yes, he is older, more mellow, happy and so there is a lot of slush tracks. Get past those and he still has it in bucket loads, his lyrics are as strong as ever and his voice is superb, rich, best I have heard it I would say.

The whole CD is worth getting for the first and last tracks alone. Opening with the rivetting If Your Love Cannot Be Moved and ending on a drum driven title track which you just want to go on for ever and ever.

He still falls back on 'isms' as per Pastime Paradise but the title song refers to this and so he gets away with it. Moon Blue is slow and pure magic, Shelter In The Rain is A Bridge Over Troubled Water for 2005 and everyone should read the lyrics to So What The Fuss.

Not up there with Songs In the Key of Life or Innervisions but strong and lyrically arresting, I shall visit it many times!

We have time for racism
We have time for criticism
Held bondage by our ism's
When will there be a time to love