I’ve long liked Goldfrapp but the new album, Seventh Tree, is their best offering yet. The new single A&E is typical of the album’s sound: lush, organic, floaty, mesmeric. Seventh Tree is a tightly- and expertly-crafted album that comes across as being conceptual without the high-brow connotations normally implied by use of that term.

In an age where intelligent pop is rare, Seventh Tree should be welcomed by anyone who isn’t defined by a specific genre in terms of the music that interests them, but instead simply appreciates the really good stuff.

Several tracks remind me, with their soft and gentle William Orbit-esque electronica arrangements, of Madonna’s greatest-ever long-player, Ray of Light. Sometimes, listening to Alison Goldfrapp’s breathy and aurally-seductive vocals, I am reminded of Sandie Shaw kicking around in the 1960s sans shoes, before being whisked away in my head to images of Kate Bush cavorting in dry ice while lip-syncing to Babooshka.

All of this isn’t intended to suggest Seventh Tree is in any way derivative. It isn’t. It’s just that Alison Goldfrapp has in many respects grown naturally over time, instead of being forced like rhubarb under a bucket by record company executives to go in directions unwanted. The new album sees Alison and her co-conspirator in the fight against pointless pap, Will Gregory, turn their backs—at least for now—on the dancefloor grooves of previous offerings. Seventh Tree lacks nothing despite this bold evolution in sound which might potentially alienate some long-term fans but will most definitely reach out to procure new ones.

Doubtless some of the tracks when released as singles will be spoiled with unnecessary beats applied over them in this or that club remix. Don’t get me wrong, I love Ooh La La as much as anyone can, but Seventh Tree is not a dance album and obviously wasn’t intended to be. It’s a collection of songs to soak yourself in after a hard day; a deliciously-scented bubble bath.

This isn’t an album for kids, unless they’ve somehow acquired a sense of discernment years ahead of time. It’s an album for grown-ups looking to reacquaint themselves with a little elegance and class in pop music. Seventh Tree is a somewhat mystical-sounding title, and the album definitely has a new age, Pagan, even gothic feel to its songs, although it never descends into darkness or despair. A more appropriate descriptive for its emotional tone would be melancholic. It’s certainly not depressed or depressing.

Seventh Tree has a remarkably healing, soothing effect. It reaches out to your soul and strokes it. It’s a truly remarkable achievement, and there isn’t a duff track to be found in the collection—any one of them, if released as singles, would be light-years ahead of anything else taking up space in the charts these days.

I’d recommend you rush out to buy, I most certainly would if the album was available right now, but I’ve been lucky enough to hear a pre-release version. But I wanted to give my readers the heads-up on what might turn out to be the best album of 2008 (and yes, I know we’re only in February). For the time being, get the single A&E . And yes, it is available not only as the version you hear in the video above, but as a bunch of remixes I can’t comment on as I’ve yet to get hold of them—so whether they’ve beefed up the revs for the dancefloor, I can’t say. There are two mercifully DRM-free EPs, and you can download them from iTunes here and here for just £1.99 each.

So go dress your MP3 player in something really fancy. I’m about to go grab the EPs myself as soon as I’ve published this blog entry.

It’s time not only to stop buying cheap chicken because of the appalling cruelty involved, but to boycott Tesco stores completely after the supermarket giant stuck two fingers up this week at animal welfare and farming groups by cutting the retail price of its standard whole chicken to £1.99. This is, of course, because the Chicken Out (see sidebar, left) and other associated campaigns have led to more and more people rejecting cheap chicken in favour of free-range and organic.

The arrogance of Tesco is incredible and we can only hope this latest move to, as the chain would say, ‘give the consumers what they want’ becomes known for what it really is, which is an effort to give Tesco what it wants—which is every penny of your hard-earned cash, and to hell with morality.

The store says bringing down the price of a bird from £3.30 will benefit ’shoppers on a budget’. It is more the case that every little helps—to use the store’s slogan—in the company’s efforts to prevent broiler chickens rotting on the shelves rejected by consumers. They aren’t selling. Everywhere you go, be it supermarkets or local butchers, free-range chickens are being sold faster than they can be bought in. What’s more, there’s a shortage.

It seems the UK has, almost overnight, rejected cruelty in chicken farming and begun demanding ethically-sourced birds.

As a vegetarian, I am delighted. I have long said I would be entirely content not to convince others to stop eating meat, but to persuade them to buy only that which has been raised well and has lived a natural life. I am not at all delighted by Tesco. I am disgusted. I will not shop at Tesco again until such time as the company reverses this latest move. I urge everyone to do the same. After all, switching to a different supermarket isn’t going to make a huge difference to your weekly outgoings or impact on your choices of food and other items. Sure, if you switch to Waitrose you will be paying a heck of a lot more for everything but a move to Morrisons or Asda won’t cause anyone any hardship.

All supermarkets are, of course, dubious in many of their practices, especially in how they treat British farmers and how they seek to deceive the public through misleading labels. But Tesco is the worst of them all, and is long overdue a dose of humility. The only people who can dish that up are the British public.

Don’t give Tesco your money anymore. Not until it learns we have the power to make or break it, no matter how big the company is.

The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) says the £1.99 chicken is an ‘extremely ill-judged and short sighted’ move. How the hell can any farmer make a profit on these birds when they are being sold to the public for that price? Tesco claiming this move is good for the customer is bullshit—how can this be good for our economy, when farmers are going to end up in the red? The public and the farming industry are not two entirely separate groups. They need us, we need them.

An NFU spokesman said the decision to cut the cost of standard, intensively-reared chicken was ‘completely the wrong thing’ to do. ‘They’re devaluing the product and doing it at a time when, overall, the market is strengthening and chicken prices are rising. They’re sucking value out of the supply chain and unless Tesco is going to subsidise this, it is not a sustainable price.’

‘We have been working hard for a while to increase the amount of higher-welfare chicken we sell,’ says Tesco’s media director, Jonathan Church. Along with many other people, I beg to differ. The chain has been caught out by the upsurge in demand which was inevitable once the public became educated as to why those broiler chickens are so damn cheap. ‘No-one should feel guilty buying a chicken just because it is good value,’ Church added. Well, he would, wouldn’t he? And he’s quite wrong.

Should you feel guilty buying an animal for under three quid that has been living in misery all its short life, swimming in its own faeces and having no ability to act according to its nature? Yes. Absolutely you should. There is no excuse. If you can’t afford to buy meat from ethically-reared sources, then don’t. Or eat less but better quality. A chicken a week, or a chicken a day, is not in any way essential. Five fruit and vegetables a day are, and nobody ever went overdrawn buying a bag of carrots. Save the chicken for when you can afford to buy one that wasn’t tortured and miserable its whole life.

Behind the price cut we can easily see the real reasoning—the company has also increased orders for free-range birds, which it says makes up 30% of its total chicken sales. That figure would be even higher if the shelves weren’t empty of free-range chicken when people entered stores to buy them.

Tesco insists it has doubled the amount of free-range and organic chicken it is buying, and has seen a 70% rise in sales of premium birds compared to a year ago. ‘The only reduction we make is in the price, not the welfare,’ says Church, perhaps the most obscene and ridiculous claim ever to come from a representative of the store chain. Consumers can be ’safe in the knowledge’ that Tesco’s birds have been ‘raised in the highest welfare environment,’ he added.

Oh really, Mr Church? If that’s so, show us the pictures. Come on! Post some photos of the natural, wonderful lives those chickens had before they ended up on the shelves! You can’t. Because they didn’t. And because the truth would put most people off their dinners.

Compassion in World Farming (CIWF), which praised the chain in its latest supermarket survey for improving the environment for indoor-reared birds, believes Tesco has taken the wrong approach. CIWF Director for Research and Food Policy, Dr Lesley Lambert, made a most excellent point. ‘If Tesco is prepared to drop their prices in this way,’ she said, ‘why don’t they decrease prices on higher welfare chickens and make them more accessible to poorer consumers? While Sainsbury’s has committed to massive improvements in animal welfare, Tesco is showing its ethical credentials with this race to the bottom. Scientific research shows that many of these birds are lame and likely to be in pain and live their lives in their own faeces. Consumers have shown they will vote with their wallets on the basis of animal welfare.’

Tesco is continuing, of course, to rig the system through its bulk purchasing muscle, to ensure cruelty pays and compassion costs. But this tactic, long in use, seems to be failing where chickens are concerned.

CIWF wants to see all supermarkets move away from buying intensively-reared chickens, and provide greater welfare for birds produced indoors.

The bottom line is, Tesco, in common with all the major food retailers, now has many hundreds of thousands of tons of broiler chickens approaching their sell-by dates and nobody is buying them. In today’s decision to drop the price, the supermarket chain has utterly failed to see which way the wind is blowing. It’s not a dissimilar situation to that of Masterfoods last year, when that company ran foul of consumers by switching from use of vegetable rennet to animal rennet. Masterfoods thought, as Tesco does today, that a bit of PR spin was all that was needed. Masterfoods faced an unprecedented campaign and quickly—within a week—reversed its decision. We can make Tesco back down by employing the exact same tactics—boycotts, letter-writing, phone calls.

Don’t just wait to see how the story ends. Take action. Make a difference not only to the diet of the nation, but the welfare of animals.

Boycott Tesco. When the profit margins are hit, the supermarket giant will surely bow before the British public and beg us to come back into its stores.