According to one of rock criticism's more debatable maxims, few bands have more than three good albums in them. As if in deference to that rule of thumb, Perry Farrell, ringleader and singer of the late Jane's Addiction, pulled the plug on that band soon after its third album. It was a perverse move – Jane's Addiction were at the height of their popularity – but it ensured that the group's place in rock history would remain untainted by charges of careerism or declining inspiration.

Two former Jane's Addiction members, guitarist Dave Navarro and bassist Eric Avery, have gone Farrell one better: After forming Deconstruction with drummer Michael Murphy, they recorded one album and then called it quits. (Navarro now plays guitar with the Red Hot Chili Peppers.) Deconstruction, the band's hello and goodbye, provides a fascinating postscript to the Jane's Addiction story. The songs, most of which clock in at somewhere near the six-minute mark, are elaborately constructed tone poems that unfold in a loopy, nonlinear manner characterized by abrupt instrumental mood swings.

Typical of Deconstruction's mercurial musical nature is "L.A. Song," which begins with tastefully mysterious acoustic guitar and portentous lyrics. Just as you're slipping into the sleepy groove, blasts of choppy, skewed funk guitar burst in; moments later the song has changed shape again, and Navarro and company are scaling the heights that Jane's Addiction reached on their 10-minute opus, "Three Days."

Similarly, "America" moves through a number of disparate sections so seamlessly that you barely notice the song's seven-minute length. "Single" begins and ends with an increasingly hackneyed device – spacey noodling backs voices reading from a personal-ads column – but its middle section seethes, rumbles and scorches as Navarro muses over a less-than-satisfactory coupling and wrings torrents of epic noise from his guitar.

As you may have gathered, traditional pop-song structures are pretty much nonexistent here (one exception being the moody "Son," an open letter from a young drug addict to his mom). Despite their pretensions, however, Deconstruction's arty concepts do jell into a coherent whole, and the short-lived trio has left behind an album of remarkable complexity and grandness, a crazy quilt of folk, metal, funk, fake jazz, thrash and post-beatnik poesy. To what extent Navarro's restless avant-garde stylings will be submerged in the more earthbound context of his new gig remains to be seen, but Deconstruction will provide challenging listening while the jury is out. (RS 693)

TOM SINCLAIR