With his 1976 smash, Year of the Cat, and its haunting, Casablanca-fantasy hit single of the same name, Al Stewart went from cult-hero folkie to the king of MOR-pop in one giant platinum step. 24 PCarrots – Stewart's sixth American release and his first in two years–is the English singer/songwriter's defense against the charges of soft-rock sellout pinned on him like a scarlet letter after Year of the Cat and its sleek, sleepy followup, Time Passages.

On 24 PCarrots, Stewart – with his fine band, Shot in the Dark – presents himself as a jack-of-all-trades and, surprisingly, makes it work. Though his fragile, whispery voice isn't ideal for high-volume rock & roll, he does a credible imitation of lounge lizard Bryan Ferry in the Roxy Music-like raver, "Mondo Sinistro." He also manages to hold his own against the cranked-up, neo-heavy-metal guitars of "Paint by Numbers," whose central riff bears a suspicious resemblance to the one in Blue Öyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) the Reaper."

Stewart scores most of his points teaching old standbys – his historical folk epics and imagistic pop ballads–new musical tricks. The chugging electric guitars recur in "Constantinople," an ethnic-flavored vision of Moslem holy wars, twentieth-century style. Al Stewart applies stark touches of Steely Dan-type jazz and locomotive Latin percussion to "Running Man" and builds to a climactic sax break in "Midnight Rocks" with gentle counterrhythms and a heavenly, Abba-phonic background choir. The narrative suite, "Murmansk Run/Ellis Island," is cut from the same mold as "Nostradamus" (1974) and his frankly autobiographical opus, "Love Chronicles" (1969). But the upbeat arrangements and crisp, immaculate production (by Stewart and engineer Chris Desmond) invest both the suite and the singer's nostalgic characterizations with an urgency sorely missing from producer Alan Parsons' cotton-candy approach on Time Passages.

24 PCarrots may not do much for Al Stewart's hipness quotient, since he's already been condemned by New Wave elitists as just another Cat Stevens: i.e., the patron saint of the secretarial pool. Yet the new album, offbeat title and all, offers convincing evidence to the contrary. (RS 330)

DAVID FRICKE