Working with the super-producer Steve Albini in the haunted Abbey Road studio, the Auteurs prove they've lost zero edge since their New Wave debut and 1994's grimier Now I'm a Cowboy. This third release is like a rock & roll dispatch from a parallel universe: glam, punk, early Bowie and the Beatles being taken apart and put back together all wrong.

Nothing here should work, but everything does, from the snarling insistence of "Everything You Say Will Destroy You," which frontman Luke Haines sings over a languorous strum, to the menacing march of "Buddah" and the frankly cheery visions of child murder in the title song. After Murder Park spins out its vaguely ominous, vaguely paranoid warnings of political and emotional betrayal with hypnotic, almost unvarying slowness. The Auteurs have achieved a kind of twilight status as underground superstars, but they're at the top of the charts in some other lucky dimension. (RS 734)

ARION BERGER