Sometimes an album is worthwhile not for how you feel while listening to it, but for how you feel afterwards. Such music is especially worthwhile when you need to drastically alter your mood, which becomes necessary when, say, your life has changed a little. Recently hired at an understaffed hospital, I spent the day manning six phones lines, handling contaminated materials, faxing and filing medical reports, booking radiological procedures, distributing mail, and appeasing doctors who are furious with me, the incompetent neophyte.

But perhaps worst of all is the weight of old age that surrounds me. The people in the waiting area seem to gain a year in age every minute they wait for a relative to die. There are also the pale, frozen faces of the abandoned dying, who lie on gurneys against hallway walls, their eyes closed or fixed on the ceiling, their mouths agape. And then there are the three scary women I work with. Peering over the upper rims of their bifocals, their eyes fix themselves on my fresh male meat as if to possess me. And their flesh hangs everywhere, begging for similes: under their eyes like miniature mudslides, under their lower lips like a pocket of chewing tobacco, under their chins like the wattle of a turkey. In ominous voices rife with phlegm-- surely not from years of smoking, but from squabbling over a bubbling cauldron about fair vs. foul-- they ask me to do tasks for them: "Come here, young man. I have something for youuuuuuu."

So, yes, after all this, I need something to get in my veins and slow me down, all drug-like-- to break the spell, if you will-- in an hour or less. Life Changes does just that, and without the nail-in-the-head hangover.

Ski (Oakenfull) is actually English DJ Dominic "Ski" Oakenfull. His last name, of course, bears an unfortunate similarity to international house DJ star Paul Oakenfold. Thankfully, his music does not. Under the moniker "K-Creative," Ski signed with Gilles Peterson's Talkin' Loud imprint while he was still in high school, releasing Q.E.D. in 1991. Since then, he's continued to work in the shadows of the acid jazz scene, which the legendary Peterson fathered in the early '90s. That scene, of course, truly took off with the help of yuppies, those perennial scapegoats, and it spawned unfortunate hacks such as Jamiroquai. But as an intermittent member of Raw Stylus and a keyboardist for Galliano, Oakenfull stayed true to Peterson's path.

Now, on his first official solo album, Oakenfull has all but abandoned the acid jazz sound that he helped sculpt, and has moved closer to trance and house, of all genres. But judging from the opening track, "Fifths," you might not have suspected a thing. The wavering underwater atmospherics, rhythmic guitar notes, strong-yet-mellow beat, and of course, Ski's funky, jazzy keyboards all mislead the listener into expecting Herbie Hancock meets Air. The next track, however, moves the album from downbeat to house. Even the keyboards are reined in and relegated to the background for this straightforward dancefloor number, which features a hypnotizing, vocodered repetition of the title, "Keeps Running Thru My Mind." I know vocoders are the evil of now, but here it somehow works. Maybe Cher didn't kill it after all.

Oakenfull employs the vocoder only once more, and it's tamed not only by a juxtaposition with Earl Zinger's rap musings, but also by an old-skool beat (a marriage of late-'70s disco and early-'80s rap). The rest of the album, however, doesn't disappoint. The orchestral trance of "Undercover" and the Morcheeba-esque title track will submerge your consciousness without you knowing it until it's happened. "Come with Me" is what Basement Jaxx would sound like if they had more tact and taste. And the French-English vocals of "On My Way" manage to be genuinely soulful. Even the other two pure-house numbers, "Where Did the Love Go?" and "Keep on Moving"-- along with the two big-beat numbers, "Serotonin" and "Drop It"-- are fun without being embarrassing.

But the standout track here is "Take Off," if only because, as the closing track, it has the courage to push the boundaries. Which also makes it hard to categorize. The beat would be considered trancy were it predictable, but it's not. Brazilian percussion is combined with tones of Eno, which isn't so unusual until the quick, breathy ha-ha-ha's slice into the song. The beat becomes increasingly fuzzed, and Ski even brings his greatest asset-- the keyboards-- back into the forefront, albeit temporarily, for the first time since the opener. The final product is both chilled-out and eerie.

The album title is probably a personal reference. Let's hope so, because this music won't change anyone's life. I'd bet... let's see... $11 an hour on it. Oakenfull would have been more modest and accurate had he named it Ephemeral Life Changes, instead. But maybe I'm just being selfish. See, that way I can hope the title's also an accurate, timely reference to my current situation at the hospital in Salem, Mass.

Yes, that Salem. Otherwise known as "The Witch City." But I'm not scared; I've finally got a decent antidote.

-Ryan Kearney