For Jules Shear, Love Is Still a Puzzle

JULES SHEAR

“The Great Puzzle”

Polydor

* * * 1/2

It’s tempting to drop bad puns about “sheer greatness” in synopsizing the strengths of Shear’s “Great Puzzle.” That might be a bit misleading. This album--which, as the title suggests, is yet another agreeably vain attempt to make rhyming and rhythmic sense of that most senseless of subjects, luv --is more likely to sneak up on you than bowl you over. Its greatness is more in its afterglow.

Shear has labored long under the label of “cult artist,” but this, his best effort since his 1983 solo debut, finds him wading comfortably within the more eccentric rapids of the mainstream. “We Were Only Making Love” has the thoughtful mournfulness of some of Don Henley’s ballads; other cuts offer the kind of witty mixed metaphors and emotional literacy associated with John Hiatt.

Though the rocking “Jewel in a Cobweb” (about a fine woman trapped in a Lothario’s lair) is the most clever set-piece of similes, the subtler moments are equally rewarding. In “The Mystery’s All Mine,” Shear discusses his lover’s elusiveness with all the eloquence of Hamlet defying his questioners to pluck out his heart’s mystery: “Don’t tell me everything at once . . . I don’t want to know too fast,” he tells her. Best to savor this album’s puzzles slowly, too.

New albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor) to four (excellent).