*** Possum Dixon

NEW SHEETS

(Interscope)

It was all but inevitable that, sooner or later, Ric Ocasek would get around to producing this LA-based trio. The band's last release, '96's Star Maps, was a charming little new-wave album that would have sounded right at home next to the Cars in '78. Ocasek jettisons many of that disc's spooky quirks and brings the band's wiry songcraft to the fore on New Sheets. And though the CD features cameos by '80s hall-of-famers like Ocasek, the B-52s' Fred Schneider, and former Go-Go Jane Weidlin, it also recalls more recent alterna-rock smart-alecks: "Faultlines" sounds like the best single Pavement never wrote, and the Pixies-ish "Always Engines" wouldn't have seemed out of place on Doolittle.

Possum's appeal has always been their bratty hooks and lyrics. Here singer Rob Zabrecky takes aim at LA's leech-like world of dubious motives and clandestine connections. "You burned all your bridges and duck down from doors/You look suspicious as you wander off the dance floor," he bristles on the title track. Elsewhere, he chronicles "dried-up desperate honeys" and experts who "know where it's always midnight somewhere."

-- Jonathan Perry