Despite the fact that he's made a series of often brilliant records – with the woefully underappreciated Jules and the Polar Bears back in the New Wave days and on his own in the Eighties – Jules Shear is still perhaps best known as the songwriter behind Cyndi Lauper's "All Through the Night" and the Bangles' "If She Knew What She Wants."

Big Boss Sounds may just be the record to change that. Though the Reckless Sleepers are named after a Magrine painting, there's nothing particularly surreal about this outfit. Working with guitarist Jimmy Vivino, bassist Brian Stanley, former Wings drummer Steve Holley and producer Scott Litt (R.E.M. and the dBs), Shear has chosen a warm, groove-oriented sound that downplays some of the claustrophobic but lovable quirkiness that marked both his inspired Watchdog and Eternal Return solo efforts.

Unsurprisingly, much of Big Boss Sounds concerns affairs of the heart. But Shear seems to be trying to accentuate the positive: "This Heart," a rugged little rocker that he wrote with Heartbreaker Mike Campbell, is about refusing to have a broken heart. Even better is "If We Never Meet Again," the only song on Big Boss Sounds that Shear wrote by himself. This is one of the finest songs in the entire Shear catalog, an emotionally direct number that tries with characteristic intelligence to make sense of a love that has died: "I want to have a little faith/There's something better/At the end of this path/'Cause these memories/Get old and flat like photographs/If we never meet again/If goodbyes remain unbroken/I won't glorify our past/But our bond remains unbroken/If we never meet again."

For the most part the other Sleepers back Shear competently, though occasionally, as on the otherwise infectious "Tried to Please Her," Jimmy Vivino's guitar work is too Seventies slick for this sort of material. Still, Big Boss Sounds is totally boss, a Shear delight. (RS 539)

DAVID WILD