Album Reviews : Making a Good Case Out of Lost Love

***, CHRIS ISAAK, “Forever Blue”, Reprise Some artists reinvent themselves every time out, and others keep making the same album over and over. Isaak is quintessentially in the latter category; fortunately, it’s a pretty swell album he keeps rehashing.

The patron saint of unrequited lovers, Isaak has devoted a career to riffing on a single theme--The One That Got Away--and there’s genius in his overkill, in how obsessive form matches obsessive function. All his interchangeable laments may be so much mock-suicidal performance art, but Isaak’s dulcet whispers and falsettos sound so perfectly ghostly, you’re willing to take his haunting as fact. Isaak’s fifth could’ve stood a tad more such aggression. Still, in his classicist case, anyway, extremism in the defense of lost love is a virtue.

New albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent).