With each album, Squeeze has made prodigious advances in wit and ambition. After beginning their career as jolly boys larfing it up at the corner pub in songs like "Cool for Cats," these English musicians, led by songwriters Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook, quickly expanded their range to such an extent that both the lovely Argybargy and the gritty Eastside Story elicited frequent comparisons to no less than the Beatles.

Sweets from a Stranger is Squeeze's response to this praise. It's a quirky, uneven, tremendously endearing and occasionally foolish record, composed of a dozen songs about commitment and romantic unrest; it could easily be subtitled Music for Marrieds. The album kicks off with "Out of Touch," as mean a song of contempt as the Rolling Stones' "Under My Thumb": "I won't be in early/I won't be in late/I won't be in at all/So don't sit in and wait." In typical Squeeze fashion, these cruel sentiments are couched in a peppy pop melody that zings along so merrily that the lyrics take a few listenings to sink in. When they do, however, they bite hard: Difford's and Tilbrook's voices yank at all the loathing–and self-loathing–that's been poured into this song about a curdled romance.

And so it goes for most of Sweets from a Stranger. "For me and my girl/Up to the altar/Time standing still ...." are the pivotal lines of "Onto the Dance Floor." But the moment the narrator says "I do," he begins to regret it, as an organ burbles sarcastically. In the bleak vision set forth by Difford and Tilbrook, marriage – or, indeed, any longstanding relationship–is constantly prey not only to adultery (a sin that's scarily, succinctly described by the squirrelly home breaker in "His House Her Home") but, even more insidiously, to sheer boredom. Squeeze wrings new meaning out of the old adage "Familiarity breeds contempt," and lyricist Chris Difford's verbal skills–the skewed puns and delicate alliterations, the artful quatrains and vivid imagery – are never more acute than when the songs describe a love gone sour.

Yet Sweets from a Stranger is a flawed achievement. On this album, Squeeze has become too self-consciously eclectic; the leaps from one pop genre to another are occasionally clumsy. The soupy melody of the saloon ballad "When the Hangover Strikes," for example, must be one that Frank Sinatra rejects with regularity. The lyrics of "Stranger Than the Stranger on the Shore" is one of the album's most incisive sketches of a crumbling union – the stranger on the shore is a mate who's grown unfamiliar to her alienated lover – but the song itself is an irreverent march tune that huffs and puffs to no apparent dramatic effect. Similarly, "I've Returned" is a revvedup apology with melodramatic chords that recall Bruce Springsteen at his fruitiest, and "Tongue like a Knife" rambles on too long, elaborating the album's weakest metaphor.

But these are all forgivable sins, and there's enough first-rate music and humor on Sweets from a Stranger to suggest that pretty soon, those Beatles comparisons aren't going to seem overstated at all. (RS 371)

KEN TUCKER