With winter here, it is important to make sure that you have stocked up on all the necessary tonics to banish the cold from your bones. Dark beer, for example. Good red wine. But what do you do when the application of those tonics is inappropriate (say, at 8 o’clock on a windswept morning while walking to work?). In that case, you need a musical tonic, and I have come across none better for 2008 than this superb album from English producer Mex AKA Black Grass.

Three is, as you might expect, the third album from Brighton-based Black Grass, and Mex has described it has as his Return of the Jedi, with some Ewoks thrown in for fun but without unnecessary CGI. In fact, there’s not much of anything unnecessary on this album; I couldn’t find the Ewoks, even listening through headphones, but I also couldn’t find any tracks merely there as filler, either. From the short but sweet Introduction (“I’m alright now/I made a bad decision/but I’m alright now”) to the last track, the dubbed out Away, this is engaging, intelligent, diverse, and most of all, warm and fun.

Warmth and fun are both qualities best shared, and a number of collaborators, both from Brighton and elsewhere, feature on the album. Brighton soul singer Dionne Charles leads on three tracks (including Hold Fire, an ode to, well… not putting out) and the controlled power and raw soul of her voice are used to great effect. Brighton MC Koaste (who has recently been in Australia touring with Black Grass) contributes a witty flow to the beer-hop party tune Splash Some Cash (“Best supply the booze, mate/We party hard/And there ain’t a lot of room on my Barclaycard.”) It’s not all local, though; other stand out tracks feature New York hip-hoppers J-Live and The Good People. To leaven the hip-hop, you’ve also got ska and reggae bubbling away on the stove in tracks like Bass Man and Stormy Weather, and Spanish flavours in the wonderfully wide-screen instrumental Quetzalcoatl Returns.

It would be easy with so many different guests and styles to create a hotch-potch, but instead this album manages to combine all of the influences and all of the personnel into a coherent, consistent whole made for boom-boxes, headphones, block parties, and anywhere else music is played. If you need proof of that, think on this; I was doing some ironing while I was listening to this album (it’s all go-go-go in my jet-setting playboy bachelor lifestyle) and even while ironing I couldn’t stop myself from bopping along. It really is that good.

In Splash Some Cash, Koaste puts it this way; “We come correct, man/Catch the fever/From run-down clubs to the packed arenas/From champagne glasses to plastic beakers”. The quality of this album deserves the best champagne glasses you’ve got on hand, but you will be bouncing around so much you might think the plastic a safer option. Either way, you certainly aren’t going to be getting cold. On a scale of one to three, Three gets a four from me.