If you were expecting an album of wry modern-life vignettes and clever, concise pop melodies from Squeeze's return – well, sorry. Each track on Cosi Fan Tutti Frutti is so musically involuted and psychologically involving that listening to the entire LP is like watching all ten episodes of a miniseries in one sitting. This record is shaded in tones from blue to gray, has a very ambitious post-Sgt. Pepper feel in the songwriting and yet is recorded in an utterly Eighties way, with contempo keyboard and drum treatments in the forefront. In this respect, the album belongs to Jools Holland, back with Squeeze for the first time since 1980's Argybargy. He sculpts the sound with his multiple keyboards – cool overlays of Mellotron-like synth, the more natural damped attack of an acoustic piano and sudden, bulleting swatches of sampled sound from the Fairlight.

Though the guitars of Squeeze mainstays Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford are shoved down in the mix (when they're there at all), the pair appear to have put extra effort into the songwriting and arrangements. These are some of the trickiest tunes they've ever written. As a lyricist, Difford has penned a morbid libretto of romantic undoing ("I Learnt How to Pray," "Break My Heart"), of family strife ("King George Street"), of dissolution by alcohol and worse ("I Won't Ever Go Drinking Again[?]," "Big Beng"), of the hazards of survival in the real world ("Hits of the Year," "Heart-breaking World"). The mood swings from black humor to bleak longing. In the agonizing lost-love song "Last Time Forever," each round of confessional details ("It all went wrong when I grew jealous") is followed by a grandly morose, arpeggiated solo from Holland.

Tilbrook, for his part, has programmed a kind of internal disorder into the music. Often, his vocal lines mesh awkwardly with the instrumental backing, suggesting a life or situation that's out of rhythm with its surroundings. In "No Place Like Home," a strange montage of elements – a Robert Fripp-like tape-loop guitar figure, a backward-tape passage, stop-start rhythms, an electronic stutter, "I Am the Walrus" cello and more – disorients the listener like a walk through Oz. There is one great Beatlesque pop hook here, in the chorus of "Break My Heart" (which goes, "There are more fish/In the ocean/But somehow they're not for me"). Still, "By Your Side," which lifts the lid on Cosi Fan Tutti Frutti's drizzly spirits with a soulful, beseeching vocal from Tilbrook, would make the likeliest single.

They close the album with "I Won't Ever Go Drinking Again(?)," a surreal vaudeville about boozing that describes, in hilariously vivid images ("How my head's like an anvil," "My hair like a tree"), the scattered, incoherent feeling of a postbinge comedown. What a long, strange trip it's been, all the way around. (RS 458)

PARKE PUTERBAUGH