Throughout a career as singular and honest as his expressive voice, Robert Wyatt has remained a true progressive. From his days in the Soft Machine, advancing jazz concepts into Sixties rock, the drummer-keyboardist has become England's elder statesman of political pop. Capable of mentioning radical polemicist Noam Chomsky in a song without missing a beat, Wyatt has a knack for turning left-wing intellectualism into palatable art.

On what is only his third album in a decade, Wyatt continues to personalize the recording process. Nothing Can Stop Us (1981) employed spare, careful production to eloquent effect; Old Rottenhat (1985) made an ambitious virtue of modesty. Dondestan takes homey minimalism to the brink of creative indolence. Rarely is Wyatt's naked tenor supported by much more than brushed cymbals, a snare drum and elementary keyboards – piano and organ doling light chamber jazz or funereal dirges. Drawing on such a simple and sedate canvas, this Picasso of pop can make sweeping artistic statements with the tiniest sketch marks.

Songs float along in minor keys, gentle gusts of melancholy bearing a chilly afternoon drizzle. But the lyrics (half of which are poems by Wyatt's wife, Alfreda Benge) don't evoke equal – or even corresponding – resonance. Wyatt's words lean effetely Marxward, into vague musings like "CP Jeebies," a wan consideration of Communist party factionalism, and "Lisp Service," a gentle pox on imperialism. While more suitably reflective, Benge's painterly tableaux of nature and religion engage the music as sounds rather than visions.

Given Dondestan's lulling atmospherics, its two incongruities are all the more jarring. Wyatt declaims the entertaining "Shrinkrap," a whimsy about the cost of analysis, in the style of Ian Dury. But that's a minor surprise compared with "Dondestan," a maddening one-finger piano exercise that repeats the sentence "Palestine's a country or at least used to be" ad nauseam. In an oasis of intelligence and understatement, such crude juvenilia is dismaying. (RS 623)

IRA ROBBINS