Yearning for faith amid crisis

Sting

“Sacred Love” (A&M;)

***

From the gorgeous musical arrangements to the probing themes, this is Sting’s most ambitious album since “The Soul Cages,” his somber, intensely personal 1991 reaction to his confusion and grief after the death of his father.

The heart of this album is also about trying to recover emotional balance and faith. But the subject matter is more elusive: the restless anxiety of a world again in crisis, a timeline that stretches from the Sept. 11 terrorism to the Iraq quagmire.

There are moments, including “Inside” and “Dead Man’s Rope,” when Sting rises to the challenge by capturing the helplessness and despair of the times. In the former, he sings, “Outside the walls are shaking / Inside the dogs are waking / Outside the hurricane won’t wait / Inside they’re howling down the gate.”

The work reflects the blend of world music and Western pop-rock influences that lent some of the English singer-songwriter’s most inspired moments a comforting, universal sheen.

But there are other places where the music feels too restrained. The electronica snap in a bonus track -- the Dave Aude remix of “Send Your Love” -- greatly improves on the album’s formal version of the song. The lyrics feel too familiar in places. Yes, love is the answer, but the message isn’t updated in any meaningful way.

The singer’s duet with Mary J. Blige on the gospel-etched “Whenever I Say Your Name,” however, brings out the best in both of these excellent artists, a vocal interchange that has both sensual and spiritual heat.

-- Robert Hilburn

Keenan rotates a full circle

A Perfect Circle

“Thirteenth Step” (Virgin)

*** 1/2

Maynard James Keenan is not all about the doom and gloom of life. Forget what you’ve heard in Tool, in which his guttural cries lean toward the joys of agony and defeat. With A Perfect Circle, Keenan is a different man, with a lighter, brighter touch (if never exactly light), right down to his promise in this album’s final moments: “I choose to live.”

Tool remains a significant hard-rock presence, a rumbling, jarring monolith of doom and grime. A Perfect Circle is a different shade. What might have begun as something to kill time during long, frustrating delays between Tool albums has become, with its second album, a fully realized band with its own purpose and character. And Keenan sounds like a different singer, with a slipperier vocal style, free of sonic grime.

Guitarist Billy Howerdel leads a band able and willing to shift tempos and volume abruptly, turning to strings and complex textures before erupting again with dramatic sledgehammer riffs. “The Outsider” comes closest to Tool territory, with Zeppelin-esque flourishes of drama and urgency. “Crimes” is spookier, an instrumental that drifts into “The Nurse Who Loved Me.” It’s here that Keenan croons a lilting, romantic tale across strings and fluffy keyboard sounds, suggesting feelings rarely explored in the darker sonic dungeons of Tool.

-- Steve Appleford

Franklin sparkling, material less so

Aretha Franklin

“So Damn Happy” (Arista)

**

It’s easy to take for granted anyone who has been around for as long as Franklin, but just spend three minutes with the opening track and your jaw is likely to drop. Even with her 15 Grammy awards, it’s hard to remember the unquestioned Queen of Soul ever singing with more freedom and command.

On “The Only Thing Missin’,” Franklin yelps, coos, screeches, growls, testifies and rejoices. She injects similar vocal fervor in other key tracks.

So why doesn’t “So Damn” make us happy?

The songs (too conventional) and arrangements (bright and busy but generally anonymous) don’t come close to matching the inspired vocals.

The exception is “Falling Out of Love,” written by Burt Bacharach, Jed Leiber and Jerry Leiber. The pop-flavored ballad moves along in a delicate, unhurried fashion, helping establish a tension that adds to the effect of the love-gone-wrong lyric.

When Franklin sings, “You say hello and I want to die/ ‘Cause deep down I know it means goodbye,” she stretches the words “die” and “goodbye” in ways that convey such acknowledgment and pain that it may earn her a 16th Grammy.

-- R.H.

Dido sticks with the familiar

Dido

“Life for Rent” (Arista)

**

This electronica-minded singer-songwriter from England saw her career jump-started dramatically when a song from her 2000 debut album, “No Angel,” was picked as the theme for the “Roswell” TV show and when Eminem sampled another track in his landmark “Stan” single.

And there was much to like in the album. Dido seemed like a slightly poppier version of Beth Orton, another British songwriter whose music combines melancholy reflections and gentle dance-music textures. Her looks at romantic longing and need were enchanting.

In returning to action here, Dido and her studio team have again come up with some moody, melancholy refrains that might land them another spot on a TV series and a rap track.

For the rest of us, the album seems stuck in a single emotional groove, with Dido’s whispery vocals and her tales of more romantic longing and need seeming stale. There is little of the boldness or illumination that you’d like to see in an artist’s second record. The first one sold millions, and either Dido chose to stick with what’s worked or she simply didn’t have anything more to say.

-- R.H.

Bowie shuns experimentation

David Bowie

“Reality” (ISO/Columbia)

** 1/2

The Bowie “event” album of recent vintage came last year, when “Heathen” marked the singer’s move to the Sony Music empire and his reunion with producer Tony Visconti, who helmed such Bowie gems as 1970’s “The Man Who Sold the World” and 1977’s “Low.”

The excitement among Bowie’s loyal core audience stirred by those elements isn’t likely to recur with the second installment of this chapter. This Bowie-Visconti co-production lacks “Heathen’s” easy warmth and sense of renewal and remains isolated from the vigorous, jarring experiments of its most recent predecessors.

“Reality” is one of the few albums in Bowie’s 35-year career that’s neither a provocative, essential commentary on the state of culture nor a misguided disaster. Instead it’s pleasant-sounding, mildly enigmatic, uncharacteristically placid collection dominated by rich, gleaming, clinical-feeling rock.

Bowie’s detractors accuse his music of having no genuine heart, but he’s shown that compelling artistry can be carried by theatrical means as well as by rock’s immediacy. Here, though, only “She’ll Drive the Big Car,” an evocative sketch of a couple’s alienation, manages to do the trick.

-- Richard Cromelin