For Australia's Dirty Three, good music, like the best lovin', is a slow-motion affair. Violinist Warren Ellis, guitarist Mick Turner and drummer Jim White play with such taut adagio sensuality on Ocean Songs, their fourth album, that at times the music seems to freeze in midrapture. Ellis' violin – which has the raw, wizened tone of a bone-tired saloon singer – can hold a single note for an eternity; Turner's terse plucking is framed by pregnant stretches of reverb. And White doesn't just keep time – he keeps it in check. He washes the waltzlike "Sirena" in the silvery rain of his cymbals; White's brushwork at the end of the elegant crawl "Distant Shore" sounds like a broom sweeping a barroom floor after closing time.

Because Ocean Songs moves like sweet lava – Ellis' seesawing in the lengthy "Deep Waters" evokes the marching-in-place tension of early Philip Glass – it is easy to overlook the emotional, transportive force of Dirty Three's instrumental, scorched cabaret blues. "Black Tide" suggests the Grateful Dead's "Dark Star" reset in postwar Paris. In "Authentic Celestial Music," Ellis generates rolling waves of urgency and regret as Turner's guitar unexpectedly bolts upright in the mix and White's sticks and brushes rattle through the quiet like distant slamming doors.

Dirty Three are in no hurry to enlighten or entertain. The magic of Ocean Songs is in the undertow, the way the music pulls you into its deep, blue moods, lifts you out and leaves you cleansed. (RS 786)

DAVID FRICKE