Suppose you gave a Party and everybody came – even though you were really hoping to spend a quiet evening a front of the fire. That's the quandary poor Karl Wallinger found himself in when, while working on Bang!, he stopped making music by himself for himself and put together a bona fide band, not just a group of musical yes men.

Faced with that scenario, he's gone to great lengths to take the name of his outfit literally and give the public something to dance to. Bang! is a veritable housewarming party, celebrating the Private Revolutionary's move from his ascetic garret to the shag-carpeted, patchouli-scented pad recently vacated by Lenny Kravitz. Wallinger is hardly a shaman, but in expansive, soft-focus funk tunes like "Rescue Me," his utopian millennialism actually seems as if it could propel an antislacker backlash. A new-found urgency suffuses the album, permeating even the lush chamber psychedelia of "Is It Like Today?," in which an angry God berates the environmentally incorrect.

That vitality is a byproduct of Wallinger's having abandoned his one-man-band approach in favor of a pseudocollective that loosens him up to the point where he can toss off snappy one-liners like the thirty-second "And God Said...." But when he focuses too hard on Saying Something, Wallinger gets lost in the stream of platitudes: The Celtic talking blues "Kingdom Come" exudes drippy sentiment ("What goes up surely must come down/Don't keep your head in the ground").

Surprisingly, bigger-is-better advocate Steve Lillywhite can take credit for reining in Wallinger's most glaring excesses. His laid-back production help siphons off the pretense so that Bang!'s innate funkiness can glisten in the spotlight. Hey, sometimes even fundamentalist eco-maniacs just wanna have fun. (RS 660/661)

DAVID SPRAGUE