Simply Red of Manchester, England, remain best known for the '80s hits "Holding Back the Years" and "If You Don't Know Me By Now" (a blue-eyed cover of the Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes song). They're the most enduring English believers in the international religion of pop soul this side of Sade. Building on a stout mastery of old-school ballads, Simply Red released their fourth album, Stars, four years ago. That collection of sparkly songs about love, money and celebrity expertly caught the empty dazzle of Thatcherite Britain. Ten million copies worldwide later, the LP stands as Britain's Thriller. In the United States, it remains a relatively unknown gold seller.

Life, Simply Red's new album, opens with "You Make Me Believe," a flutey love groove that flexes subtle instrumental muscles, arriving at one of those sublime post-soul places Massive Attack visit. With rare command and airy confidence, lead singer and songwriter Mick Hucknall's free tenor steers the music next into "So Many People," another groove that reroutes the silken pulse of trancelike club music into a more immediately accessible ride. "Fairground," Simply Red's current single, is an extraordinary creation: a song about the heaven of romantic anticipation that manages some of the mystery of Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk." "Fairground" whips village percussion, martial drumming, carnival colors and an enormous sing-along chorus into unusual emotional sense.

The rest of Life gets prettier yet darker. The bummed memory of "So Beautiful" yields to the flashes of pain in "Remembering...," a deceptively graceful funk jam. On "Out on the Range," a lot of Hucknall's frustrations emerge, but the music remains steady – it's wracked R&B from "a lonely boy" no longer interested in rage.

This music offers contact highs and absorbing drifts. It also offers a balance of the personal and the familiar, the pop and the eccentric, the old and the new, the depressing and the optimistic. Didn't anyone ever tell Mick Hucknall that world superstars don't usually come up with albums as soulful and weird as Life? (RS 721)

JAMES HUNTER