With "nine objects of desire," singer/songwriter Suzanne Vega's first album in four years, she deftly executes a difficult artistic maneuver: moving ahead by stepping back. The industrial-remix treatment by DNA of Vega's a cappella ditty "Tom's Diner" was an unexpected hit in 1990. But its success also pushed her so far into the icy world of machine pop – and away from the gently penetrating quality of early songs such as "Undertow," "Marlene on the Wall" and "Luka" – that by 1992's 99.9 F, Vega's words and melodies had gotten lost in an impressionistic blur of blips and bleeps. That album's critical and commercial failure proved that her modernist tack was just, as she called one of 99.9 F's typically obtuse tracks, bad wisdom.

Vega is now a wife (she is married to producer Mitchell Froom) and a mother (they have a daughter, Ruby), and Nine Objects of Desire reflects great changes in her lyrical and musical perspective. She addresses the anticipation of birth and death, respectively, in "Birth-day (Love Made Real)" and "Thin Man." There are the remembrances of past mistakes in "Headshots" and, in "Caramel," the fear of new ones. And Vega does all this with an impressive clarity (there's hardly an oblique word or thought here) and economy (no wasted ones, either) that recall her earliest work and are wonderfully displayed in the pointed reflection of "World Before Columbus" ("If your love were taken from me/Every color would be black and white/It would be as flat as the world before Columbus/That's the day that I lose half my sight").

Yet the music is surprisingly spare and buoyant. Against Froom's evocative production and keyboard backdrops, Vega confidently makes her way through the Eurocafe balladry of "My Favorite Plum," an Astrud Gilbertostyle samba; "Caramel"; the arty folk of "Honeymoon Suite"; and even a hint of techno rock in "Casual Match." In Nine Objects of Desire, she has made an album of change and adventure – and good wisdom. (RS 748)

BILLY ALTMAN