It's not every day that the grunge stormtroopers and mental rave animals that comprise the NME's elite corps are reduced to blubbering jellybabies by a new record in the office, but that's what's just happened since "Understand" the debut LP from BRIAN, arrived in our Stamford Street eyrie.

Men and women more accustomed to chewing nails along to Superchunk records have been whimpering and swooning on a daily basis as its autumnal strains fill the room. Delicate, plangent, crepuscular (yowsah!); it threatens to make mummy's boys and big girl s' blouses of us all.

To put it in the vernacular of carp film trailers, Ken Sweeny is Brian . And Brian is the conceptual umbrella covering Ken's diaphanous, tender songs. 'Understand' features eight songs on innocence, loss, despair and yearning. Ken id a Dublin boy, but hi s fragile tunes owe more to the jewelled lustre of classic Smiths and Go-Betweens than to the chest beating blood and thunder of his native city. Says Ken :

" I've no time for the big Irish guitar bands. That smugness and arrogance. I don't see why all pop songs have to be loud and over-done. I'm trying to reach people in more of a covert, back-door way. I suppose I'm laying myself open to being called wimpy or whatever, but that's just what happens. When you wake up in the morning and pick up your guitar you don's always write something that'll get you signed to MCA. Sometimes it's something a little gentler. Or maybe it's just that I don't have the looks or the arrogance."

In place of arrogance and looks are songs possessed of fragile strength and some of the most luminous guitar strategies since God-knows -when. And Whilst 'Understand' is no bludgeoning rock work-out, neither is it limp wristed or fey. 'You Can't Call Hom e' is quiet an emotional storm, whilst the title glows with remembered hurt." Basically its about an Irish guy in London coming to the realisation that thing's aren't going to work out. These are the feelings that touch people. We all know them. Besides, there are enough smug and clever people."

Brian is the latest in a growing line of top ingenuous pop fun from Setanta, the world's most enthusiastic little record label. Ken is full of praise for host body whilst acknowledging that he might not be " your usual Setanta stuff, whatever that might be".

Ken can see the possible downside in being a one-man band. " I suppose there's the feeling of being a gang and all that crack. I miss that. But I don't miss haggling people to do things they're not interested in. And I think the songs benefit from being obviously one person's point of view."

Nevertheless, Brian will be on the proverbial road come the autumn with a live band but an 'intimate feel' . And to ask the obvious but pertinent query , why 'Brian', Ken?

" Brian was the bassist in a previous band, He always had the best haircut, the best clothes, the best records. He had Albert Goldman's book on Lenny Bruce. He just represented good taste and cool. And I wanted his name to live on in some way."

And, at the end of the day Brian. let's hope that boy does brilliant.