Patricia Barber Modern Cool Premonition 741 *****

For those who spent so many hours in Patricia Barber's underground classic Cafe Blue (Premonition, 1994) and waited four years for its sequel, the opening track of Modern Cool, "Touch of Trash," hits with a rush. There is Michael Arnopol's insidious bass again. there are Mark Walker's drums, shaking the cadence for another Barber processional. And there is the Barber voice again, the near-whisper that can silence large rooms and turn even stockbrokers and computer programmers inward.

Modern Cool has everything that made cafe blue special: original songs, simultaneously aloof and inclusic, with their crystallizations of private late-20th century moments; outside-the-box choices for covers from the popular repertoire; spare, sleek, telling arrangements by Barber's working quintet; startling sound quality by engineer Jim Anderson.

But Modern Cool has more. The originals are stronger. "Silent Partner" is roughly a love song, if that term can apply to an ambivalent submission to the loss of selfhood. "Company" is a devastating dramatization of the vacuous, high-tech pretensions of our stylized time. "Let It Rain" and "Winter" trace delicate validations of the personal in the meterological. The covers find Barberesque insights and paradoxes in such unlikely places as Paul Anka's "She's A Lady." Her interpretations of "Light My Fire" and "You And The Night And The Music" give new connotations to every word.

In the arrangements, with their open spaces, each player is fills a role. When Arnopol's bass and Walker's drums push their halting dance or when Barber's piano and JOhn McLean's guitar make stabs of color, it is for one purpose: to set the rapr atmosphere for another Barber story about ghosts of the heart. What saves Barber from melodrama is the cutting edge of her language and her self-inflicted irony. "Can't you hide the kindness in your eyes/that leaves me bleeding?" she inquires in"Silent Partner." "For company/I like lots of MTV/...contrived to/take me far away from me" she confesses in "Company."

The addition of Dave Douglas' trumpet on several pieces spins a whole new dimension within Barber's universe. (He is clarion and bent and beautiful on the wordless "Constantinople.") The entrance of a roomful of voices called the Choral Thunder Vocal Choir dramatically expands "love, put on your faces," a Barber adaptation of a poem by E.E. Cummings.