Close the door, cue up The Present, and entire decades suddenly melt away as the air is filled with timeless, displaced music. It's just the Moody Blues, painting another eccentric series of set pieces evoking a charmed, illusory world where imagination and nostalgia hold sway.

Justin Hayward and John Lodge, the band's ace songwriting team, have managed to come up with another batch of courtly, quietly reflective folk-and-roll numbers. Overall, though, the Moodies' muse was less generous than on the group's last LP, Long Distance Voyager, and the careful embroidery of their best songs is interrupted by lapses into pop-philosophical musing ("Going Nowhere") and sappy, self-absorbed poetic soliloquies. Particularly galling is the songwriting of flutist Ray Thomas, whose penchant for saccharine arrangements ("Sorry," "I Am") recalls the more top-heavy orchestrated ballads of the predisco Bee Gees. Yet the Moody Blues are at their creative best on "Running Water," "Meet Me Halfway" and "Blue World," with their lilting cadences and gentle flourishes. Despite the fact that The Present has more weak spots than usual, one knows better than to write off the Moody Blues, for they'll surely return again in a few years, offering new visions of romantic dream worlds. (RS 407)

ERROL SOMAY