FairgroundTown has been burnt countless times by buying CDs on the strength of a single song, only to find out the rest of the album wasn't worth the plastic it was printed on. A classic example would be Counting Crows' Hard Candy, which contained one of the finest rock'n'roll songs every recorded (Hard Candy) and 14 other tracks that need to be taken to Sellafield and buried under 20 meters of concrete for the next two-hundred-thousand years.

Three songs in, Nerina Pallot's Fires was looking like another candidate for the midnight train - a wonderful opening number (Everybody's Gone To War), but was that it? No - we are pleased to say - three things saved it!

Up front, we have to admit that the first of these is that we didn't actually "buy" the album - we received a promo copy, courtesy of a friend in the biz, who thought we might like it.

But it is the songs Driving To Idaho and Learning To Breathe which really rescue this album - cool lyrics (is "stillicide" a word? probably not, but we like made-up words!) and melodies which somehow do the unexpected, without feeling too unfamiliar.

So, Nerina isn't Counting Crows! But do three good tracks make an album worth £7.99 on Amazon? Well, in this day-and-age it shouldn't matter - we can buy the three tracks from iTunes for 79p each, and spend the change on an over-priced latte in Starbucks!

Except...

We don't have an iPod - we have a Sony NWA1000 - quite possibly the worst consumer-electronics device we've ever had the misfortune to purchase, but nevertheless it is our primary music player, and getting copy-protected songs from iTunes onto it, is a non-trivial exercise, which of itself feels like it negates any financial saving we've made.

So, the bottom line is... we'll stick with the CD. Three top tracks make it just-about worth it… and maybe the other songs will grow on us!