*** Grant Hart

GOOD NEWS FOR MODERN MAN

(Pachyderm Records)

As the less famous songwriting half of the Hüsker Dü juggernaut, drummer/singer Grant Hart always cast a brighter -- not warmer -- light on the blinding confusion and searing despair at the heart of the Minneapolis trio's most trenchant work. The blazing, questing rage in Bob Mould's voice was plain for all to hear. But the desperation in Hart's poppier, more melodic disposition was always subtler, and across the scrap-iron sprawl of Hüsker's albums, his compositions often felt like a brief respite from Mould's unforgiving sonic maelstroms. Listen carefully, though, and you'd realize that songs like the OD nightmare "Pink Turns to Blue" and the "Positively Fourth Street"-ish kissoff "Never Talking to You Again" were as bitter and hopeless as anything his partner had written.

On his first solo album since 1989's Intolerance (and one on which he plays every instrument), Hart forsakes none of that deceptive, choked beauty, but he avoids trying to mimic his Hüsker days. Instead, he celebrates the classic sensibility that's always lurked inside his songs by building them into glittering cathedrals of pure pop. Indeed, the gorgeously layered guitar-and-voice symphony of "Think It Over" and the piano-and-horn-soaked testimonial "Nobody Rides for Free" owe more to Motown and Phil Spector (and early Springsteen's reimagining of them) than they do to anything on Zen Arcade. Elsewhere, the simple but stirring break-up ballad, "You Don't Have To Tell Me Now," captures with shattering accuracy a heartbreaking moment of reckoning.

-- Jonathan Perry