LOVESTRUCK.

If you walk into an American bar and ask for Scritti Politti, the bartender will probably put on the British band's 1985 hit "Perfect Way." The song is similar to music of the period by New York club artists like Madonna: very loud snare drums matched with bright keyboard lines and even brighter guitars. Green Gartside, Scritti Politti's singer, songwriter, guitarist, and only continuous member, performs both lead and backing vocals. His voice is high--almost, but not quite, falsetto. Over the punishingly clear instruments, he sounds blissful, teetering on the edge of rapture. The chorus ends with a line of stock dance-floor chat--"I got a perfect way to make the girls go crazy"--but the verses suggest that the singer spends more of his time at the independent bookstore: "I don't have a purpose, omission, I'm empty by definition. I got a lack, girl, that you'd love to be." You don't need to catch the literary references to be taken by the song, and it's unlikely that when the band lip-synched to "Perfect Way" on "American Bandstand," in 1985, Dick Clark started wondering where his Jacques Lacan books were. Gartside's singing is so fiercely unmasculine that if he weren't obviously enjoying himself so much you would think he was making fun of the Boy Georges and George Michaels of the world.

Gartside's career has been marked by unlikely turns. In 1985, at the height of his popularity, he looked like the other pretty blond boys on MTV, except that he cited Wittgenstein in magazine interviews. Seven years earlier, when he formed Scritti Politti, a musical collective of autodidacts who took their name from a book by the political theorist Antonio Gramsci, he was living in a Camden Town squat without a bathroom. Now, twenty-one years after becoming an American pop star, Gartside has released "White Bread, Black Beer," Scritti Politti's fifth album, though Gartside made it entirely by himself, in his home in Hackney. The record bears little relation to the ramshackle singles that Scritti Politti released in 1978, or to the obsessively polished R. & B. that made its lead singer famous. Gartside, who is fifty-one, has created an astonishingly mellifluous and coherent album, which is indebted to the sixties pop he heard as a child on BBC Radio 1 in Wales, where he was born.

Scritti Politti was initially three musicians, whose political outlook echoed that of other London punk bands--the covers of Scritti Politti's first singles foregrounded the means of production, so to speak, by listing the records' manufacturing costs and the addresses of local pressing plants--though their music lacked punk's aggression. Even in the band's early days, when Gartside was just beginning to teach himself to play guitar, he made music that was soft and approachable. His singing--breathy, sweet, and generally affectless--was partly inspired by Michael Jackson, whom he can sometimes approximate, and his songs tend to cycle restlessly through motifs and styles. His lyrics avoid direct confession and flowery metaphors; he embraces the conventions of pop songwriting--he's fond of the word "girl"--just enough to make a song sound inviting, and then lards it with clever political jokes, like "his hammer and his popsicle," which he dropped into "Asylums in Jerusalem," from 1980.

"Jerusalem" is one of several early songs in which Scritti Politti abandoned rock--at least as a sound--for reggae, a genre Gartside heard on the London pirate radio station Dread Broadcasting Corporation. In 1981, Gartside wrote a lilting reggae ballad called "The 'Sweetest Girl' " (note the interrogating quotes), which he intended to be recorded as a duet by Gregory Isaacs, a Jamaican singer of romantic songs, and Kraftwerk, the robotic German electronic band. ("I got a positive response from Gregory," Gartside told me. "But I went to see Tito Puente with Kraftwerk in New York, and they told me they didn't like reggae. So I ended up doing it ...