disparaged or driven into the ground their respective genres. Ever since he released drum-and-bass's first fully realized album, Timeless, two years ago, Goldie has been the face of drum-and-bass. But late last year a rival face emerged from the underground: Roni Size, a fellow Brit, whose musically and structurally impressive New Forms outdid Timeless both as a pop and as a drum-and-bass album.

On his second album, Saturnz Return, Goldie plays "Can you top this?" by trying to merge drum-and-bass with modern classical, hip-hop, jazz, punk, soul, pop – everything but polka. The problem here is that his ambition far outstrips his talent, making him seem like the genre's Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Goldie's talents lie in programming soul into frenetic beats, stretching vocals into poetry on the computer and building lush breaks out of atmospheric sounds and strings. With this strange and bloated double album, Goldie may have blown his chance at remaining a face. Now he's a character, because this set seems more the product of a loner than of a leader.

Thematically and musically, Saturnz Return seems like two separate albums: One is the 60-minute "Mother," an orchestral composition that twiddles its thumbs for 15 minutes before even dropping a beat. Pillaging modern classical for a 30-piece string section with long, pretentious, melismatic vocals (from Diane Charlamagne), "Mother" may be the Titanic of dance music: It's enormous, it's overhyped and it's not seaworthy. Unlike the Aphex Twin's attempts to update Philip Glass with ramshackle electronics, Goldie's minimalism is empty. It's more New Age: Sounds nice, but it takes you nowhere.

The remainder of Saturnz Return is a hodgepodge, mostly of collaborations. There's the angry, caterwauling, Prodigylike punk of "Temper Temper," with Noel Gallagher on guitar; the ambient art-electro of "Truth," an uncredited bonus track with David Bowie that's drumless and bassless; and "Digital," an inferior mix of Goldie's recent work with KRS-One that attempts to connect the dots between hip-hop and drum-and-bass (best lyric: "I bet they'll mention me in the next century," which is less a boast than an obvious fact, seeing as how the year 2000 is only two years away).

Goldie shows his strengths when he's working more or less alone, as on "I'll Be There for You." Here he does what he