On 'Book of Days,' from 1989, the Psychedelic Furs tried to recapture the urgency – two parts Sex Pistols, one part Velvet Underground, with a pinch of art-college pretense – of their early records. On World Outside, they plumb their past again, but only as far back as Mirror Mores (1984), their fourth album and first bona fide commercial success, which wrapped detachment, from "Here Come Cowboys" to "Heaven," in nifty pop packaging.

In the late Eighties, as a new decade approached, singer Richard Butler returned to his native London to get depressed so he could write. Since 1984, the Furs had been living in New York, and Butler was no longer relying on booze to amplify his rasping ache; in 1987, after five albums, the bank took two years off to regroup. Almost by accident, the Furs had become big in the "new music" kingdom when the John Hughes movie Pretty in Pink – inspired by and featuring their song of the same name – hit a sensitive adolescent nerve and the band became the very sound of teen angst. But "Pretty in Pink" was off the Furs' 1981 album Talk Talk Talk; by 1986, when the film came out (and the Cure ruled), the Furs were pretty much spent.

Five or six years ago, the Furs' sound was recognizable yet still new; by now it just seems dated. For that reason, World Outside has a kind of built-in nostalgia that constitutes its complex virtue, an amalgam of menacing electric guitar dirges, atmospheric swirls, raveups, an acoustic jangle here and there for pretty poignance, thundering drums. And then there's Butler, at thirty-eight, still wallowing in romantic disappointment – from love's erosion on "Valentine" to indifference toward an ex on "All About You" – his voice still hoarse with self-pity and coarse with bitterness, his accent still strong like a memory of England when it was somehow exotic, a little dangerous and cool. (RS 610)

CHRISTIAN WRIGHT