**1/2 Grace Jones

PRIVATE LIFE: THE COMPASS POINT SESSIONS

(Island)

Grace Jones's albums have become more and more a matter of style over substance, but on her earliest albums, which are anthologized here, her music had unimpeachable substance concealed within haute couture style. The string of inspired covers she recorded over her first three albums (which she did in the Bahamas with the walloping reggae rhythm section of Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare) forms the spine of this two-disc set. Unfortunately, Private Life is as padded as the shoulders of a blouse Jones wore in a famous photo, with 10 extended versions and a couple of dubs for good measure. And the ludicrously overproduced go-go-style "Slave to the Rhythm," from years later, is appended for no good reason.

When Jones is on, though, she's on, turning Joy Division's "She's Lost Control" into a razor-tipped icicle, pulling up the erotic subtext of Bill Withers's "Use Me," making the Normal's car-crash fantasy "Warm Leatherette" even more brutal by the power of suggestion. The tracks she wrote herself are actually among the most effective here: "My Jamaican Guy" spawned the flickering-red-light groove of L.L. Cool J.'s "Doin' It," and "Living My Life" is an honest, if bitter, statement of purpose for a woman whose carefully constructed image was always threatening to get the better of her.

-- Douglas Wolk