Cornershop's breakthrough second album, Woman's Gotta Have It (1995), won most of its critical plaudits on the strength of its bookend tracks, "6 a.m. Jullandar Shere" and "7:20 a.m. Jullandar Shere" – 16 minutes of brilliant East-West instrumentation that easily made up for some of the album's less-successful forays into indie rock. The band's leader, Anglo-Indian singer and guitarist Tjinder Singh, knew how to straddle his cultures, but he had yet to master the art of fusing them.

Two years later, Singh and Cornershop have hit their stride. When I Was Born for the 7th Time is a cohesive, finely crafted LP in which the last album's low-fi funk expands into low, fat grooves, and Singh's pancultural, anti-racist lyrics become more sophisticated but no less impassioned. The band's latest lineup – Singh; guitarist, tambourist and keyboardist Ben Ayres; percussionist Peter Bengry; sitar player and keyboardist Anthony Saffrey; and drummer Nick Simms – has honed its musicianship, blending a rich assortment of traditional Asian instruments with pop guitar, sample collages and DJ scratching. Best of all, Singh now toys with difference instead of merely acknowledging it: On "Good to Be on the Road Back Home," he performs a droll country duet with Tarnation's Paula Frazer; on "Candyman," produced by the Automator (of Dr. Octagon fame), Singh follows rapper Justin Warfield in a hopscotch between Indian and African-American styles.

Yet for all its stylistic pleasures, politics are the heart of When I Was Born for the 7th Time. "Funky Days Are Back Again" begins as a playful poke at being retro ("The party's got a double e at the end again/Happy days are here again, my friend") but closes with a reminder that "funky days" can be less than carefree ("Zip-zap guns are back again/Worker strikes are back again"). And a wicked rereading of the Beatles' "Norwegian Wood" brings pop colonialism full circle as it mimics the song's sitar signature while 'Singh gleefully sings the Lennon-McCartney lyrics – in Punjabi. You've got to hand it to Cornershop; even their covers are incendiary. (RS 767)

NEVA CHONIN