If the firmament of pop were a high-school yearbook, Donald Fagen would qualify for either class beatnik or class nerd. The sensibility he brought to Steely Dan and to his 1982 solo album, The Nightfly, was the self-conscious voice of a cerebral hipster who wallows in science fiction, gadgets, jazz and soul.

Fagen's new solo album, Kamakiriad (produced by his Steely Dan partner, Walter Becker), is very much in the spirit of its predecessors but is even drier in tone and more enigmatic. A futuristic song cycle, it suggests the fantasy of an overgrown kid who dreams of touring the galaxy in the coolest automobile ever built. In the opening song, "Trans-Island Skyway," the narrator takes the wheel of his magical steampowered vehicle, which comes with its own hydroponic vegetable garden. Over the next few songs he stops at various locations in a future world that suggests a sleek, ultratechnologized caricature of the one we live in. "Springtime" finds him visiting such locales as Laughing Pines, Lake Nostalgia and Cape Sincere. "Tomorrow's Girls" creates a superwoman-from-outer-space scenario that is part War of the Worlds (via Orson Welles), part Invasion of the Body Snatchers, part Barbarella. The journey eventually takes him to the Florida Keys ("Florida Room"), where he fantasizes being murdered ("On the Dunes"). It ends in Flytown ("Teahouse on the Tracks"), an end-of-the-road honkytonk from which the singer manages to tear himself away at the last minute.

Fagen's new songs are sleek, witty confections, delivered in his familiar sweet-and-sour bray and enveloped in immaculate pop-jazz arrangements that have a pointillistic precision. Although the songwriting is supple, the songs lack the passion of the best Steely Dan. It all sounds as though it were coming from a pop-music laboratory inside a climate-controlled glass bubble. (RS 662)

STEPHEN HOLDEN