The running times of the nine pieces collected on Mandrake fall within the broad compass of the usual song lengths of pop and rock music, and they are gathered into a whole which may fall a little short of the usual length of a contemporary album, but whose duration would once have been a quite respectable proportion of the day to find occupied by the contents of an LP. But not all albums are curated on the same basis, some assembling a disparate selection united only by their ostensible author, some evincing a discernible sense of creative coherence, and others united by an overarching theme, which may …