A new album that picks up where In Your Room left off, already available on CD at gigs and from Amazon at the end of this month. It annoys me that Anneke's marvellous talent isn't better appreciated in the UK - annoys me because then she might tour here in her own right (no way I'm paying to see her as the opening act for someone else). She ought to have been invited onto something like Jools Holland long ago.

If her songs have lost some of the poetry and mystification that made her part of The Gathering so unforgettable, they have embraced life as we know it and projected life as a thing of beauty to be celebrated. Confidence, love, sexiness, parenthood, the freedom that comes from commitment - these are her subjects and her post-Gathering manner of bouncy hard-rock has achieved the difficult feat of appealing equally to men and women. Warm, upbeat and genuine, and as anyone who has seen her live will know, blasting the roof off the club in a way that reveals her metal roots, no matter how obvious the popular or commercial viability.

I don't think Everything Is Changing has quite the variety of In Your Room but it certainly complements it; the new album is rockier still, even if the most captivating track is the piano and violin quiet one, Circles. Reviewing an album by Anneke Van Giersbergen, one can only banish the grumbling inner critic, perturbed by the faintly narcissistic aspect of this kind of pop music: when it is Anneke herself, when it is songwriting and more importantly singing of this calibre, self revelation is exactly what is wanted. Anneke, and her music, are eminently embraceable...