** Elwood

THE PARLANCE OF OUR TIME

(Palm)

With their post-Odelay, post-G. Love pastiche of hyphenate (folk-soul-jazz-funk-hop) smoov pop, Prince Elwood Strickland III and Brian Boland -- the duo behind Elwood -- sound as much like the product of our time as the parlance of it. So here the boys go, aided by wunderproducer Steve Lillywhite, delivering Gordon Lightfoot from the netherworld of '70s AM pop radio with "Sundown" (the unabashedly catchy first cut-and-paste single), relating sweet romance with "Red Wagon," painting gauzy club hues with the jungly "Dive," veering perilously close to misogyny with "Bush."

Strickland does have an eerie falsetto to rival the late Jeff Buckley's. But his -- and the album's -- big fault is a lack of singular identity. Although Elwood's articulate kitchen-sink approach yields some soulful, engaging material, a terrific combination of organic and synthetic elements straight out of the Dust Brothers' well-thumbed playbook, the ambitious album comes across as an almost too-familiar direct descendant of popular singles by '90s modern-rockers like Everlast, Soul Coughing, and Canadians Len ("Steal My Sunshine") and Bran Van 3000 ("Drinking in L.A."). All good groups with good singles, but limited by their own cleverness, or by lack of depth. Elwood will eventually have to deal with this problem, but for now they've got nothing to worry about except figuring out how to play these songs live.

-- Mark Woodlief