Like Portishead – with whom they often get tossed into the same barrel of brooding monkeys – Morcheeba have found the tie that binds Sixties spy music, blues-infused hip-hop and fragile balladry. Morcheeba are less tortured than their British brethren, though: On their perversely sunny Big Calm, the London-based trio takes a detour from the trippier hippie-hop of its 1996 debut, Who Can You Trust?, dragging acoustic guitars to the forefront.

The celestial, honey-dripped sighs and whispers of singer Skye Edwards keep Morcheeba from being the mere studio machinations of production whiz Paul Godfrey and his guitarist brother, Ross. Edwards is a gifted stylist who knows how to elevate the simplest lyric to a ravaged revelation or a wicked kick in the ass. Songs like the blissful, sitar-driven "Shoulder Holster," the coy reggae gyrations of "Friction" and the exhausted mantra of "Over and Over" ("I'd like to meet a madman who makes it all seem sane") rest on Edwards' ability to sweetly hover above the Godfreys' haunted observations. Big Calm is an unpredictable, seductive album, a restless walkabout for the romantically vexed. (RS 784)

KARA MANNING