Peter Murphy, a trippy lyricist with a whiskey bracer of a baritone and a flair for the exotic, writes songs that often fall a few details shy of literal sense. His gift is impressionistic. Sometimes – both with Bauhaus and in his early days as a solo artist – the impression he leaves is precious and fey. But when he's working at the height of his powers – as he has been for the most part since Love Hysteria, from 1988 – he evokes the mystical.

Holy Smoke, Murphy's fourth solo album, is a shadowy tour through the singer's winding tunnel of love. An intriguing blend of biting guitar rock and tuneful minimalist pop, Holy Smoke shifts its sonic gears with aplomb in an attempt to keep pace with Murphy's visions.

Beginning with the prayerful "Keep Me From Harm," Holy Smoke links love and redemption. Half meditation, half pop song, the track finds the singer pleading with a former lover for human closeness ("Love me hold me") and Messianic protection ("Keep me from harm"). The song's galloping coda seems less a routine pop contrivance than an assertion that through his plea, the singer has achieved an epiphany.

"You're So Close" is a catchy rock raveup that finds Murphy pining away in lust, and "Low Room" is an angry exploration of love's inequities. But it's the concept of love as a spiritual tonic that lends Holy Smoke its substance. "Our Secret Garden," in which the singer apparently achieves the perfect union, is a charming concoction of shuffling British pop and suggestive imagery: "Don't bother to close your heart," Murphy intones, "Let's drink honey in the park/Swap hats and go for free/To our secret garden." "Let Me Love You" offers a beautiful, floating chorus to imply, once again, that love is a hot line to heaven.

Truth be told, Murphy does still occasionally slip into preciousness: "The Sweetest Drop" drowns in rock-opera excess; "Kill the Hate" is incoherent posturing. But those slips are too infrequent to be damning. And the rest of Holy Smoke is strangely affecting progressive rock that works on the soul as well as the cerebellum. (RS 633)

STEVEN VOLK