These are strange times in music. Nothing, and brother, I mean nothing from the past is off- limits when it comes to cultural recycling. No matter how bad a particular genre or style of music sucked the first time around, there's some hipster going through his old records somewhere, ready to bring it back. I mean, when I was growing up, Burt Bacharach was a name I knew only in association with the embarrassing Dionne Warwick. He wrote the melodies that made the whole elevator sing. He didn't seem like such a big deal. He sure as fuck didn't seem hip, especially to a kid who used to cry in the dark listening to Journey's Escape. But somewhere, somehow, someway, things changed.

It probably started with Tim Gane of Stereolab saying something about Bacharach's admittedly brilliant arrangements in the pages of some zine. Next thing you know, Elvis Costello is making an album with him and every brainy indie rocker worldwide is gushing about him in print. What's going on, you ask? Hell if I know. But Bacharach is to brainy '90s alterna-pop fans what Lou Reed was to '70s punk: an undeniable genius to be emulated. Ours is not to ask why.

The Aluminum Group, with Jim O'Rourke behind the board, pay homage to Bacharach and his "sophisticated pop" ilk with their new album Pedals. They come from Chicago (naturally), and are led by brothers John and Frank Navin. (They sing their catchy- yet- complex melodies in a controlled croon; they arrange breathy harmonizing horns to sound like something from the first wave of the "Chicago Sound" (that is, the band Chicago), and all the lovely acoustic instruments and electric pianos fall into place with heartbreaking perfection. And the music on Pedals is stylish, urbane and designed to the hilt. If you like the High Llamas, latter- day Sea and Cake, or some of the less sonically adventurous Stereolab, you may be down with the Aluminum Group.

Whatever the merits of the Aluminum Group, they ain't rock and roll, and they don't try to be. Rock and Roll is too dumb for these academics. It's hard to imagine Mick Jagger referencing Marcel Duchamp and name- checking the futurist painter's most famous work ("Rrose Selavy's Valise"), and I can't see Chrissie Hynde offering a put- down to a lover as laboriously polite as that on "Paperback." ("Put it in the pages of your best seller, and pass it off as art.") The Aluminum Group are not about passion, they're about craftsmanship. They swing, but never low enough to risk spilling their cosmopolitans. And they are good. The fact that I'll probably never put Pedals on again shouldn't discourage you from buying it. You liked Spandau Ballet and ABC in the '80s, and now want to return to the romantic pop days of yore. It is your right. I am not mocking you.

-Mark Richard-San