**1/2 Bela Fleck & the Flecktones

LEFT OF COOL

(Warner Bros.)

After guesting on the Dave Matthews Band's newest album and opening for them on a stadium tour, Bela Fleck & the Flecktones have had a taste of full-blown pop stardom. And it seems to have led the group astray on their sixth album, Left of Cool, which departs from their unique bluegrass-jazz fusions to dabble in pop songcraft with vocals.

The grassroots success of Fleck, a banjo virtuoso, and his band owes a great deal to the group's phenomenal live shows, which depend on the incredible instrumental prowess of Fleck and bassist Victor Wooten plus the band's engagingly down-to-earth yet playful stage antics. At a typical show Fleck allows Future Man (who plays an electronic percussion instrument known as the synth-ax drumitar) to sing one -- and only one -- tune. On Left of Cool, Future Man sings six. Most of the cliché'd lyrics were penned by Fleck, but on "Sojourn of Arjuna," the most embarrassing of the six, Future Man reads passages from the Bhagavad Gita in a hipster-cool tone over a lukewarm funk groove -- it's every bit as pretentious as you might imagine. When the band return to instrumental territory, however, the funky-ass bass lines and crystalline bluegrass pickin' remind you of what put the Flecktones on the map to begin with.

-- Michael Endelman