Barry Adamson creates soundtracks for his own drama-filled dream world, one in which the film composers Elmer Bernstein and John Barry are patron saints, darkened streets are always slick with rain, men are men, and women are molls. A British-born multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and arranger, Adamson can brilliantly – and without words – suggest entire movie scenes with dizzying combinations of dance beats, jazz phrases, finger-snapping big-band arrangements, luscious strings and even references to '60s French pop. One track on Adamson's latest album, Oedipus Schmoedipus, "Something Wicked This Way Comes," is built around a sample from a 1965 record by Françoise Hardy.

But Adamson has always hit a snag with lyrics: His narratives can turn into strings of hard-boiled clichés, more Mickey Spillane than Dashiell Hammett. Thankfully, for Oedipus Schmoedipus, Adamson recruited inspired collaborators in Pulp vocalist Jarvis Cocker and ex-Associates singer Billy MacKenzie. Cocker shamelessly pants and moans his way through the high-energy, gospeltinged "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Pelvis," while MacKenzie's gorgeous, divalike turn in "Achieved in the Valley of the Dolls" reminds us that the underrated MacKenzie truly is the missing link between Gene Pitney and Shirley Bassey.

But Adamson's ballad with Nick Cave, "The Sweetest Embrace," yields only stale platitudes like, "We are losers, you and me, babe/In a rigged and crooked game." Along with the tired madonna-whore iconography in the CD booklet, this is a low point, when noir vocabulary turns into purple prose. Someone, please, give Adamson a real movie to sink his teeth into so he can finally stop using words altogether. (RS 746)

ELISABETH VINCENTELLI