Night and Day is Joe Jackson's strongest album, the first on which his ambition, craft and feistiness have fused into a coherent, emotionally charged statement. His earlier albums sounded a bit too calculated to be trusted, and there are moments when Night and Day lapses into glib social commentary. But for the most part, Jackson poses a series of musical questions on such subjects as technology, violence, sex and pop aesthetics with wit and conviction. The dominant musical idiom–salsa modified for a small combo, inflected with Oriental percussion and woven through with woozy synthesizers and drum machines–is an imaginative projection of a trashy yet catchy global pop style.

Through its sequencing, Night and Day makes a tentative spiritual journey away from a sordid futuristic cityscape toward a softer, romantic sphere that is never quite reached. In "Another World" and "China Town," Jackson stumbles through the smog trying to locate the future. When he does, the boob tube has become Big Brother ("TV Age") and the city streets, human shooting galleries ("Target"). It is here, the cheerful popsalsa jingle "Cancer" assures us, that "everything gives you cancer."

Night and Day is held together by four songs in which Jackson personalizes his vision of social decay. Tinted with electropop, "Steppin' Out" portrays a couple's romantic venturing into the night as a brave act of innocence. In "Breaking Us in Two," which echoes Steely Dan's "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," Jackson debates with anguished uncertainty the boredom of monogamy versus the loneliness of independence. The album's loveliest song, "Real Men," solemnly blends string chamber music with echoes of Phil Spector, as Jackson sorts out the contradiction between the traditional male role of warrior and today's macho gay culture, finding both to be not only misogynous but antihuman: "Kill all the blacks/Kill all the reds/And if there's a war between the sexes, then there'll be no people left." Finally, in "A Slow Song," Jackson argues against the macho tyranny of overamped dance-rock: "Am I the only one/To want a strong and silent sound/To pick me up and undress me/To lay me down and caress me?"

Joe Jackson's last album, the Louis Jordan tribute, Jumpin' Jive, revealed him to be a nostalgist underneath his trendy facade. Night and Day (note the Cole Porter title) spells out the same yearnings in much clearer and more personal and compelling terms. (RS 376)

STEPHEN HOLDEN