of the Beatles, Pink Floyd and the Byrds through a modern looking glass, the English singer and guitarist and ex-Soft Boy has demonstrated an acute intelligence, an ear for uncommon melodic designs and a mariner's skill for finding his way home after forays into dead seas. This time he's sailing along with a sure sense of direction.

Although Moss Elixir stops short of the solo minimalism of 1990's Eye, it untangles the sometimes strained complexity of 1991's Perspex Island and 1993's Respect with unfussy arrangements that field a single guitar or a full electric band to the same glowing effect. With cagey horns, wafty background vocals and a brisk beat, "De Chirico Street" is Moss Elixir's most decisive-sounding track, although the song's hallucinatory narrative – in which "numbers turned to fingers and the fingers turned to flies" – is as reality challenged as a Salvador Dalí clock.

The rhythmically aggressive "Devil's Radio" better illustrates the element of forthrightness that has been growing in Hitchcock's work. Dropping jokey references to Stalin and Mao Tse-tung at the outset, Hitchcock proceeds to the more serious issue of broadcast evil: "Limbaugh, he was talking through a bimbo/But don't touch that dial/Or that hateful smile." Likewise, Hitchcock's generation-gap dig in "Alright, Yeah" ("I gotta split/It's a quaint old-fashioned way/To leave the room") bespeaks a more mature and grounded mind-set than the noir drollery of "Man With a Woman's Shadow."

Those open to a full dose of Hitchcock's latest prescription will need Moss Elixir's limited-edition and quietly superior vinyl-only companion, Mossy Liquor. Besides alternate versions (some with strings and piano) of six Moss Elixir numbers – including "Alright, Yeah" translated into Swedish and a longer but no less beautiful "Heliotrope" – Mossy Liquor doles out six extra songs, most notably "Trilobite," which details several eons of paleontology in three comical minutes. (RS 745)

IRA ROBBINS