Ah, to be 21, your Strat strapped on and a horn-laden band to big you up: and not to mention that Jef Beck barnet you've had coiffed for the cover shoot. It all kicks of with Rypdal in compulsory Clapton via Mayall mode (well, this is 1968), but quickly shifts to a rough hewn Wes Montgomery homage against a bold, but hardly original, brass arrangement. More intriguing is Rypdal drawing on his Scandinavian roots with ‘Winter Serenade’. More rampaging is the title-track, reminiscent of what Ray Russell laid down with Mike Gibbs, while ‘Sonority’, with its moodiness and jingling percussion, likewise has a Gibbsian feel. Bleak House, despite the title, is rattling good fun, and rather more than a musicological morsel to be relished from another era. But Rypdal himself would soon create much more original material. And get a less derivative haircut.