These are the dreams of the everyday housewife — well, at least the dreams of the everyday schizophrenic housewife. The latest opus from Annie Lennox and David A. Stewart (working as a duo again after a couple of albums in which they used outside musicians) goes a few steps beyond the themes of Bruce Springsteen's Tunnel of Love, moving into the world of domestically induced insanity. More or less a concept piece in two discrete parts, Savage is a series of sometimes harrowing portraits that represent an abrupt shift from Eurythmics' equally intense but more user-friendly recent work.

Side one goes inside a mind twisted by the confusion of a stifling relationship. Lennox's characterizations are often chilling, especially as she chirps the title line of "Do You Want to Break-Up?" with all the sweet innocence of a love-struck teen asking someone to go steady, while Stewart plays appropriately light, spare synth pop.

On side two, Lennox's split personality gets its acts together. On "I Need a Man," she's a female Mick Jagger drawling cock-tease lines over Stewart's Keith Richard-like guitar; on "Put the Blame on Me" and "Heaven," she's a cooing disco diva; and on "I Need You," she becomes an acoustic singer-songwriter longing for emotional abuse ("I need someone to pin me down so I can live in torment"). On the whole, the second side is more muddled musically and lyrically than the hypnotic first, and the it-was-all-a-dream resolution (the multilayered vocal showcase "Brand New Day") seems a bit trite — the heroine walks out, head held high. Still, this unsettling story makes another distinctive entry in the Eurythmics catalog.

“Let My Love Open the Door”

A peppy, hopeful love song, "Let My Love Open the Door" became a U. S. Top Ten hit for Pete Townshend in 1980, anchored by the kind of repeating synthesizer figures that he'd used in some of the Who's recordings in the previous decade. Although Townshend brushed the song off as "just a ditty" in Rolling Stone shortly after its release, in 1996 he revealed it was about love of the holiest sort. "It's supposed to be about the power of God's love," he remarked. "That when you're in difficulty, whether it's major or minor, God's love is always there for you."