Et tu, Rickie? just like myriad middle-age guitar strummers and rock groups a little too anxious about staying hip, Rickie Lee Jones has hopped aboard the Trip-Hop Express. On Ghostyhead, verse-chorus songs are replaced by spooky atmospherics, acoustic guitars are entangled in tape loops, and stories are dumped in favor of enigmatic sound snippets.

Jones already has employed some of these nontraditional devices since her 1979 debut, but longtime fans will be hard pressed to recognize her on Ghostyhead. As Jones herself sings on the opening lines of "Road Kill": "What's the matter with it?/Why does it look that way? ... What's it trying to say?"

Jones sounds desperate to show off her harder edges. She has a song's character score some ecstasy on "Fire-walker," turns the protagonist of "Howard" into a young sadist who likes to burn his sister with cigarettes and reveals that the folks in "Little Yellow Town" tear the wings off lightning bugs in search of, er, enlightenment.

In the past, Jones' songs could be pretty shapeless, but Ghostyhead is a mess – at best a well-produced demo full of formless sound collages. John Leftwich's upright bass gives some of it a swanky groove, and Rick Boston's programming is full of pretty decorations, especially the plinks and rattles of percussion on the Eastern-flavored "Cloud of Unknowing."

What's missing is structure, which undoes Jones. Her wayward voice can be intoxicating in the right framework, as when she poured her considerable heart into the neojazz ballads of 1991's Pop Pop. The trip-hop of Ghostyhead, however, lets Jones indulge her boho eccentricities without having to worry about writing any actual songs. Bad idea. (RS 764/765)

GREG KOT