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The music he made with The Jam some 30 years ago is enough for Paul Weller to have earned his place in the history books, an impressive enough body of work for fans to overlook the occasional missteps that followed.

The Style Council weren't everyone's cup of tea, but still produced some powerful and vital work, especially the album Our Favourite Shop. Weller's second rebirth, as a solo artist, started well, the albums Wild Wood and Stanley Road both musically eloquent and lyrically articulate statements, the man himself growing up at the same pace as his original new wave audience.

A patchy period followed, but he was back on track with 2008's 22 Dreams and 2010's award-winning Wake Up The Nation, a genuinely reinvigorated writer and performer with little to prove but a lot more still to say. Subsequently, Weller's new album has been eagerly awaited; would be able to sustain such an astonishing level of quality? Would he be content just to rest on his laurels?

This is Paul Weller, though, one of the most passionate artists of his generation, and Sonik Kicks finds him refusing to sit still. Laurel-resting is not on the agenda...

Green

The abrasive electronica of the opening bars appears to map out new territory for Weller, a symptom of his recent conversion to the vintage 1970s sounds of Krautrock figureheads Neu.

Staying on the same chord throughout, synths and feeback guitar breaks weave from speaker to speaker across the vocals. Lyrically, the free form half-spoken words bring to mind Pop Art Poem, a rarity from the days of The Jam.

The Attic

A further meshing of musical styles, this cryptic tale of forlorn love is underpinned by pizzicato strings that could have been borrowed from the early '60s hits of Adam Faith, yet the rhythm track and thunderous bass belongs to the raucous garage rock of a few years later.

With Noel Gallagher helping out on guitar, Weller places himself in the middle of the maelstrom, the attic of the title referencing happier, less romantically fraught days.

Kling I Klang

More German influences, with the wiry instrumentation of Krautrock battling for supremacy against a strident melody reminiscent of pre-war Berlin cabaret, with a smidgen of Eastern European folk thrown into the mix.

For all its mannered vaudeville, the song actually couches a serious lyric, with Weller cataloguing a string of observations about war in the Middle East.

Weller onstage at Coachella festival. © Tim Mosenfelder/Corbis

Sleep Of The Serene

An abstract instrumental soundscape, originally meant to be the opening of a longer piece that has yet to see the light of day. Weller and fellow guitarist Aziz Ibrahim exchange disjointed passages, the chaos and improvisation tempered by melodic strings, arranged by Sean O'Hagan of The High Llamas.

By The Waters

Ibrahim and O'Hagan loom large again, with Weller revisiting the reflective pastoral hues of 1993's Wild Wood album on a delicate ballad. The soft-strummed guitars resound with ghostly Nick Drake motifs, but it's O'Hagan's strings that give the track extra depth and texture.

That Dangerous Age

The 53-year-old Weller is in gently self-mocking mode on a song initially inspired by onlookers' reactions to the age gap between him and his young wife Hannah (more of whom later).

A not altogether serious study of a perceived mid-life crisis, the falsetto backing vocals and clipped funky rhythms owe a debt to Motown and Stax, although the descending chords of the bridge are closer to 60s Brit psychedelia.

Study In Blue

Hannah steps up to the mic for a trippy, jazzy duet that drifts toward atmospheric dub in its second half. Weller himself describes it as one of the most uncomplicated, straightforward love lyrics he's ever written, and also acknowledges its musical debt to his Style Council days.

Dragonfly

Continuing the family motif, the trance-like space rock with a vibrato bass line by Marco Nelson is complemented by a lyric inspired by a poem his youngest daughter Jessie wrote at school. "I just took the first line from each verse and built on them," he says.

Blur's Graham Coxon weighs in on both angular guitar lines and Hammond organ.

When Your Garden's Overgrown

Featuring Noel Gallagher on guitar and bass, this rousing singalong and portrait of English eccentricity has an obvious connection to The Kinks' songs of Weller's childhood, although he says the free-spirited central character of the lyric is more inspired by Syd Barrett, pondering what the Pink Floyd founder might have been had he not pursued a career in music.

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