Despite his rather hefty involvement in the Band Aid project – which included producing "Do They Know It's Christmas?" and playing most of the instruments on it, as well as accompanying shipments of goods to Ethiopia – Midge Ure has kept a low profile in his partnership with Saint Bob Geldof. This unassuming, low-key approach is wrapped around The Gift, a ruminative solo album whose charm lies more in its insinuation of melody and texture than in immediate impact. Though not as baroque as Ure's work in Ultravox, The Gift runs along the same lush, symphonic synth-pop lines.

A sleekly pleasant though not terribly forceful or gritty vocalist, Ure relies on his easygoing, seemingly intuitive sense of orchestral structure to put his message across. Ure's is a suave sensibility, often very Ferry, but lacking Bryan's underlying hysteria and extravagant high irony. The choice of 1940s Hollywood glamour photographer George Hurrell to shoot the cover photograph is no coincidence. Hurrell has made Ure look like a revisionist David Niven, the movie star whose style most closely matches Midge Ure's music: dapper, elegant, slightly swashbuckling.

Midge Ure obviously does take his pop song craft and studio perfectionism seriously. The album begins with "If I Was," a soaring, Kiplingesque expression of Ure's humble wish to be a wiser, stronger, better man. His musical values are firmly rooted in the hedgerows of 1970s British art rock, as he demonstrates in his technopathic reworking of Jethro Tull's "Living in the Past." A cross-culturalism permeates side two, where instrumentals abound. "Edo" invokes Japan through the use of a koto; "Antilles" is a souped-up rocker reminiscent of some of Phil Manzanera's primitive guitar work; and "The Chieftain" manages to sound simultaneously Gaelic and African.

Midge Ure's identification with his listeners blends with a kind of neo-Yeatsian paranoia on "Wastelands," which owes more thematically to "Baba O'Riley" than to T.S. Eliot. Ure's uncharacteristically dark vision is of a lad alone in his room, psychically detached as he takes solace and comfort in his favorite records. It turns out that "this angry noise is the Muzak of the wastelands," portending urban apocalypse to a rock & roll soundtrack. The title track is reprised, giving the album a conceptual continuity. On The Gift, Midge Ure acknowledges and demonstrates his strengths and his responsibility toward them. (RS 469)

TIM HOLMES