Kicking off Simple Minds' tenth album, ominous strings introduce delicately threatening guitars, world-beat percussion slams in, and Jim Kerr snarls, "Quit dreaming/This is real life/Baby." Lush off-kilter keyboards urge the mini-epic toward a crescendo that, earnest and theatrical, recalls the group's considerable gifts. Most of Real Life shares the power of the Minds' trademark stress on atmosphere over melody; the remainder, however, reveals the technique's weaknesses – sketches passing for songs, gorgeous flesh without much spine. What might have been the band's most cohesive record misses, if only by frustrating inches.

Spawned in a Glasgow ghetto in 1977, Simple Minds turned from punk outrage (their original name: Johnny and the Self-Abusers) into an outfit flexible enough for the spiritual uplift of Once Upon a Time, from 1985, and the Third World advocacy of Street Fighting Years, from 1989. This time, Kerr's lyrics evoke a mature tension of disenchantment ("Summer's gone and I can't tell you lies") and romanticism ("Love will conquer everything"), his from-a-whis-per-to-a-wail singing remains dramatic, and the band plays smart – Mel Gaynor is a shamefully underrated drummer; Charlie Burchill is one resourceful guitarist. But a fragmentary chant-along like "Let the Children Speak" and the formulaic swagger of "Travelling Man" drain the legitimate strength of the gemlike "Rivers of Ice" and the savvy of "Stand by Love" (a sort of Celtic-reel-meets-Spencer-Davis rocker) – and the album doesn't quite add up.

Still, Simple Minds can't be faulted for lack of spirit. An ongoing experiment, they combine craft and soul with honorable ambition, and their themes – of love and conflict, the mundane and the mystic – remain serious and inspiring. (RS 606)

PAUL EVANS