In Brief

* * 1/2 Belinda Carlisle, “Real,” Virgin. The former Go-Go has always stuck with pop of the sort the girl group was famous for--some of it good pop, some of it bad. On her fifth solo album she’s armed with perhaps her best batch of songs yet, particularly the sly “Big Scary Animal,” but she nonetheless manages to add a few tracks to the bad count with some unattractive vocal histrionics.

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