alluring.

If you buy this album, it most likely will be to hear the deft, delicate musical webs spun by Faithfull's collaborators and cowriters–guitarist Barry Reynolds, keyboardist Wally Badarou and bassist (and husband) Ben Brierly–and not to hear the lady babble her bad poetry in a parched voice. A Child's Adventure begins – as any true child's adventure almost certainly would not–with "Times Square" and ends in bed with a hangover and endless remorse ("She's Got a Problem"). Along the way, we meet the cunning sadist of "The Blue Millionaire"; with Faithfull reciting her verse over a smooth funk vamp, this song sounds like nothing so much as a Doors clone band attempting a lounge-disco version of "The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)." Then there's the jilted miserable of "Ashes in My Hand," whose lover's return is "taken in extreme despair."

"Extreme despair" would well describe the mood of this record, but this isn't so much razor-edge desperation as the sort that finds retreat in the numbness afforded by alcohol and narcotics. It's a quiet storm, with Faithfull's pitiable laments absorbed into the pillowy textures of the music: Reynold's clean guitar licks, Badarou's elegant synthesizer playing, the danceable tempos. It all comes together–decadence and romance–on "Running for Our Lives," a song that for a moment draws you to peer inside Faithfull's Pandora's box with rapt fascination. But though most every song has some little filigree to keep you coming back, the overall effect is incandescent yet lulling, suggesting that the artist has been wallowing too long in her own entropic dilemmas. (RS 393)

PARKE PUTERBAUGH