A dozen years ago, on their milestone Made to Be Broken album, Soul Asylum ranted with all the bottled rage of youth about "just killing time." On Candy From a Stranger, they've finally offed the bugger. Tinged with an autumnal air of wistfulness, this set of downbeat power pop and countryish laments from frontman Dave Pirner finds the group's brashness giving way to resignation, its resolve yielding to fatalism, and its rock & roll will turning to mush. Pirner sounds weary of life underneath the volcano, professing caustic self-pity with the carefully enunciated opening line of "Draggin' the Lake": "Sent on a mission to find out just how much shit one man can take." Such sentiments are nothing new for Soul Asylum, whose previous album, Let Your Dim Light Shine, opened with a song called "Misery," which repeated the words "frustrated incorporated" as if the band had a corner on the market. What's different is that instead of kicking at his chains, Pirner now sounds acclimated to them.

His dolorous mood is matched by restrained production that takes the rock & roll edge off the guitars. Pirner is awkwardly sentimental one moment ("Close," in which he sings like Axl Rose by way of Billy Joel) and resigned to inhabiting a darkening chasm the next ("Blackout," a New York vignette wherein it's hard to discern whether the singer or the city has blacked out). Not that Candy From a Stranger is entirely a lost cause. "Creatures of Habit" opens the disc in a whirling, neopsychedelic haze reminiscent of the Beatles' "Rain," moving from what passes for positive thinking ("If the darkness has no end/Light up the darkness") to a sweetly hook-y sing-along chorus. "No Time for Waiting" is illuminated by Pirner's palpable yearning and driving melodicism, while "Lies of Hate" flexes some sorely needed muscle via heavy, Led Zep-style riffing.

By and large, however, there's something defeated and unresolved about this album, evident in defensive entreaties like, "Please don't ask me how I am/A little tired, a little scared" (from "Cradle Chain") and "Am I still here?/Can you see me?/Please say yes" ("Draggin' the Lake"). Something about Candy From a Stranger – namely, its enervated revisiting of old themes – feels like treading water. Another album like it three more years down the line might seem more like drowning. (RS 787)

PARKE PUTERBAUGH