Pacifier: Pacifer

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * * )

There was always going to come a point where the band formerly known as Shihad weren't going to be satisfied just with being angry young men - or the great white hopes - of New Zealand rock.

And this, the name-change album, is the sound of that dissatisfaction.

Long-time local Shihad fans, who had seen them transform from young metal wonders to something a whole lot more interesting by the time of last album, The General Electric, may find it unnerving.

It's in comparison to that previous album that Pacifier pales in many ways. Yes, Pacifier may go all the way up to 11 after the efforts of wunderkind rock producer Josh Abraham (Limp Bizkit, Staind) in the studio. He may have encouraged frontman Jon Toogood to have been more direct and heartfelt in his lyrics. And it may have 9/11 as its backdrop - just like every other album recorded in the northern hemisphere now coming out.

But while The General Electric was warped and imaginative and varied and sounded like nothing else around, Pacifier plays it straight, plays it loud, and gets those choruses to ring forth the angst, one after another.

It also buries Shihad/Pacifier's real power - its rhythm section - beneath a lot of powerchord guitars.

An incidental irony - the song Pacifier, which the band chose as their new name and which appeared on The General Electric - would sound seriously out of place on Pacifier the album.

There are songs, like the opener and single Comfort Me, Run and Nothing, that make one suspect the heavy cut'n'paste hand of Pro-Tools studio software in their construction and their overwrought choruses - rather than rock instinct. That's especially so of the irksome Comfort Me which goes from opening jittery Shihad-riff bit, to tortured verse bit, to the squiffy giz-a-hug chorus to rap-metal bit.

It does bring some distinctively Shihad firepower to bear on a run of tracks, the likes of the glorious Bullitproof, Semi-Normal (the My Mind's Sedate of the piece), and the hydraulic Trademark sounds like the best song that Nine Inch Nails never wrote.

But it's hard to get past the idea of this being a 12-track green card application - and that if any of the hometown crowd start mumbling about liking their old stuff better than their new stuff, then it has done its job all too well.

An English reviewer memorably noted that if Shihad were American they would be unbeatable. Problem fixed.

THE FLAMING LIPS

Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

(Warner Bros)

When the raves went up for the Flaming Lips' last one, The Soft Bulletin, some of us stood back and scratched our heads.

However, we're quite prepared to join any club dedicated to espousing the many and strange virtues of this, the veteran Oklahoma band's follow-up.

Like its predecessor, and as suggested by its title, Yoshimi ... is an ambitious affair. Apparently, it's not a concept album but its sci-fi themes and its production suggests its own dreamy world.

Its nifty tunes - as delivered by frontman's Wayne Coyne's Neil Young-like, helium-powered voice on what are a run of lovely, strangely affecting songs, which ponder big questions (like "Do you realise that everyone you know will someday die?") in between whispering sweet nothings on songs with titles like Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell - make this something utterly special.

Yes, it might sometimes resemble Mercury Rev, those fellow exponents of New American Psychedelia with whom they share a producer in David Fridmann. But it's twice the album their last one was. And some of it reminds of Beck's underrated Mutations - he thinks so too, as he's got the Lips as his backing band on his next American tour.

And yes its Manga-styled wackiness and attempts to set the underlying themes of Blade Runner to music might lose its novelty after a while. But that's a risk worth taking on what sounds like a already bona fide whacked-out classic.

Label: Wea