Gramsci: Object

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * * )

The follow-up to last year's Permanence for Gramsci - the Auckland outfit headed by singer-songwriter and musical progressive thinker Paul McLaney - is certainly an elegant-sounding affair. It wafts, it cascades, it sighs heavily through billowing clouds of electronic textures.

But with McLaney's voice - which he mostly restrains here to a lower-register croon reminding variously of Bowie, Lloyd Cole and David Sylvian - given such an immaculate framework, Object can feel a mite frosty.

If the production and synth-heavy arrangements are overbaked, McLaney's songs still shine through on tracks such as This Ain't a Lovesong and Beautiful Life (where he can come on like a one-man gospel chorus) and Take What You Have Gathered From Coincidence (until that is, it descends into an outro that is pure cruise-ship funk).

However, the occasional ambient piece like Architecture (listen, someone's whispering "architecture") adds little, and on the likes of Constantinople all that elegance just gets too languid for its own good.

A clever, ambitious album but its attention to sonic detail makes it hard to hear behind its sleekness.

Label: Machine Recordings/Zomba