Back when Blondie was becoming America's biggest New Wave band, Deborah Harry's deadpan lyric barbs cut the edges around her paper-doll appearance. This is the woman, after all, who called her flame "a pain in the ass" on "Heart of Glass," Blondie's first dance-pop hit. Far from lolling, Harry kept her tongue firmly lodged in her impossibly wide cheekbones. Her New York sass, backed by cohort Chris Stein's savvy (and the rest of the band's musical smarts), made her the ultimate urban babe: streetwise, glamorous, tough, very cool.

On "Stability," the second track on Debravation, Harry's first album in four years, the ex-Blondie (she's au naturel these days) cracks wise again: "I heard you but what did you say?" she says, ribbing the guy who's trying to orchestrate her life. The song's rock-steady beat (shades of "The Tide Is High," another Blondie hit) provides the perfect setting of lazy romance for the song's droll exasperation. "Must I take pills for stability?" Harry asks with a very '90s recovery-weary wryness. It's a vintage Harry-Stein collaboration: sophisticated, knowing and playful, a risqué bite lurking beneath its smile.

Unfortunately, it's one of the few songs on Debravation on which Harry bares her teeth. The album's title proves self-descriptive, as the artist's voice gets lost in an ungainly jumble of genre exercises and guest producers (Jon Astley, Arthur Baker, Anne Dudley, John Williams, etc.).

The trouble with Harry is she has never really been self-sufficient; when she can't find material as plastic as her own sense of poetic perversion all her arch interpretation falls flat or – more dangerously – inflates rather than deflates the pomp of pop. On "Rain," "Communion" and "Mood Ring," she spiels stormy, mystic images over equally overwrought symphonics, like some New Age-meets-disco alchemy experiment – as though someone forgot to write mock in front of the word serious on the production notes.

Baker's crystalline touch on "I Can See Clearly" and Williams' retro-punk production of "Standing in My Way" show what Harry – her voice as rich and charming as ever – can do with the right material. Debravation isn't much better than her 1981 solo debut, Kookoo, or much worse than Def Dumb and Blonde, from 1989.

Still, there's a discouraging ring of defeatism in Debravation's notable lack of ironic reach: I wish Deborah Harry were still trying to influence and move the pop market instead of seeming all too ready to settle for VH-1 and overseas acclaim. (RS 667)

EVELYN MCDONNELL