*** Capercaillie

BEAUTIFUL WASTELAND

(Rykodisc)

The latest from Scotland's Capercaillie (named after the largest and most beautiful of their country's grouses) continues their trend away from trad and into fusion. The good news is that more than half of Beautiful Wasteland is delivered in Gaelic by Capercaillie's knockout lead singer, Karen Matheson; the bad news is that too often her gorgeous voice is overtracked into innocuousness, and the line-up (mostly fiddle, guitars, and drums) confounds fusion with laid-back grooves and funky sounds.

The traditional numbers, like the puirt-a-beul "Hebridean Hale-Bopp" and the tweed clapper "Co Ni Mire Rium" ("Who'll Flirt with Me"), work best, but what should have been the album's highlight, a setting of poet Sorley McLean's stunning "Am Mur Gorm" ("The Blue Rampart"), is spoilt by "added" lyrics like "Don't tell me it's easier alone." The poppy contemporary tracks, by Donal Lunny and the band's Donald Shaw, point up the difference -- just compare McLean's "And on a distant luxuriant summit/There blossomed the Tree of Strings/Among its leafy branches your face/My reason and the likeness of a star" with Shaw's "It rarely makes the news today/The place where I was born" on the title track.

"Am Mur Gorm" excepted, there's no lyric sheet and precious little by way of synopsis. Beautiful Wasteland has many beautiful moments, but when you set it next to the sharp-colored, hard-hitting eclecticism of fellow Scot (by way of New York) Talitha MacKenzie or Capercaillie's early albums (Crosswinds, Sidewaulk), it seems a bit of a waste.

-- Jeffrey Gantz