Cousteau
Sirena
Palm Pictures

Rock music from the mid-to-late '60s continues to be a bottomless source of inspiration for the genre's newcomers — just ask New York's Strokes and Australia's Vines, self-admitted fans and stylistic descendants of The Velvet Underground and The Beatles, respectively. As for that era's softer, slicker and more sophisticated pop sounds, emobodied by songwriter-producer Burt Bacharach and such artists as Dionne Warwick, Herb Alpert and Tom Jones — scant few rock artists have dared to drive that polished yet unfairly scorned road.

One of the adventurous few is the quintet Cousteau, named for the French oceanographer-documentarian Jacques. The English band made a minor splash in 2000 with its self-titled debut, which featured such Bacharach-like elements as delicate piano, silky strings and muted horns. (Nissan featured "Last Good Day of the Year," the album's defining track, in a recent TV commercial). With Sirena, Cousteau fulfills the promise made on its first disc by having enough substance to match its hipster style and grace.

At Cousteau's helm is multi-instrumentalist Davey Ray Moor, the band's writer and producer. He handles both of those duties with a steady hand, providing lead singer Liam McKahey with an emotional script and a moody, often dark musical backdrop to showcase his heavy baritone. It's easy to picture McKahey pleading with a love interest in the wah-wah flavored third track, "Heavy Weather," the outro of which features him sliding into a credible falsetto that only reinforces his desperation. "Peculiarly You" follows it up perfectly, as McKahey concedes that the best way to deal with an aloof and indifferent party is by "leaving well enough alone," while the song's piano chords and cymbals accent the relationship's distance and tension.

A sense of loneliness, heartache and despair permeates Sirena, yet it never becomes tiresome. Not since The Smithereens' Pat DiNizio did the same on Especially for You has a band with such a deep-voiced singer successfully focused an album on a small group of emotions without sounding redundant or emasculated. Whereas DiNizio & Co. sometimes contrasted somber lyrics with driving tempos, Cousteau takes a more complementary approach on Sirena, choosing instead to use rhythms that walk — or crawl — instead of sprint.

As timeless as a black-and-white photo, yet as vivid as a color image, Sirena is an album best enjoyed in solitude — the very state many of the songs' characters are trying to avoid.

— Chris M. Junior (chrisjr@mindspring.com)