The title of Lloyd Cole and the Commotions' third album, Mainstream, is only slightly ironic. The title track is about doing whatever it takes to get ahead, but longtime fans of the bookish British rocker shouldn't be alarmed. Although Mainstream should earn Cole and his Commotions a wider following, they're still making the poetic, pleasing music that earned them such high praise with their debut album, Rattlesnakes.

Cole's songs offer vignettes populated with characters who are sometimes sympathetic – there's the guy in "Jennifer She Said" who's got his ex-girlfriend's name tattooed on his arm – and always amusing. The slick, funky opener, "My Bag," mocks a self-obsessed cokehead flying through a snowstorm.

Cole's gentle vocals mesh so perfectly with the album's haunting melodies that one may not at first notice the bite of some of the lyrics. "Mr. Malcontent," inspired by the lead character in My Beautiful Laundrette, is a powerful portrait of an angry young man.

But Cole isn't all angst and irony. He looks longingly at his loss of youth in the richly textured "Hey Rusty." And he's actually kind to Sean Penn, of all people, in the track "Sean Penn's Blues." The song, which tells the story of what happened to Mr. Madonna when he was invited to read some of his poems in public and was openly ridiculed, expresses the utmost sympathy for Penn's petulant behavior.

It's time for the mainstream to embrace Lloyd Cole. (RS 545)

SHEILA ROGERS