A guitarist's ability to authentically reproduce animal noises with their axe has always been key to achieving guitar-deity status-- er, at least in my book. Link Wray may have been the first to make a guitar cluck like a crazed chicken. Every time Johnny Thunders struck a chord on his apocalyptic Les Paul Jr., you heard the gargantuan roar of vengeful woolly mammoths trampling a village of Neanderthals.

Adrian Belew, with King Crimson, and later in his own solo work, advanced guitar-based animal cries even further. His Stratocaster screamed like a giant weasel being strangled-- the kind of sound Mothra would make when going in for some Japanese pedestrians. But Belew is also a technically-gifted and elegant stylist apart from coaxing those withering fits of animalistic noise from his fretboard. Though he's gained quite a rep as an off-the-wall technical genius on guitar, many people sadly only know Adrian Belew as that guy they always confuse with David Byrne.

On Coming Attractions, Belew has thrown together disparate pieces from current, past, and upcoming solo projects. The record serves as a nice grab bag of heady instrumental guitar trickery and houses its fair share of deftly-crafted pop tunes-- especially "117 Valley Drive," a musical shrine to the Beatles and lost youth. There's also some decent but somewhat trite live acoustic material, along with plenty of insane guitars running rampant over faux-African rhythms derived from Remain in Light-era Talking Heads.

Belew uses a lot of layered metronomic drumbeats made by the sort of efficient electronic drummer that tends not to spontaneously combust and won't choke on its own vomit. Oddly enough, these minimal, cymbal-less mechanical beats also tend not to get in the way of loud, wailing guitars. But as a lyricist, Belew has yet to approach brilliance, even if he does have a facility with words most advanced guitar wizards absolutely lack-- you know, Hendrix, Satriani, Vai, Eric Johnson-- guys that make almost as many futile, often embarrassing attempts at using the English language as the music journalists who write about them.

The straightforward acoustic pop of "Inner Revolution" and "Time Waits" is passable material at best, though, and not exactly anything we haven't heard from a thousand so-so singer/songwriters. But Belew's true appeal will always be his colorful guitar vocabulary-- not mere flashy finger- exercises a la Van Halen-- and licks that take themselves a lot less seriously than Robert Fripp's hoity-toity guitar frippery. But like Fripp, Belew can often push his instrument to bizarre octave-hopping extremes, as on the instrumental "Predator Feast," while always keeping himself within the context of his songs. On "No Such Guitar," he makes his guitar sound like some weird alto-sax-cum-violin and conjures sinuous snake-charmer lines over light-as-air Tangerine Dream percussion. I suppose the rhythm here could be called tribal, but only if referring to those tribes that use programmed drums during campfire rituals.

Belew's 1989 album, Mr. Music Head, yielded "Bird in a Box," and a superior alternate take appears here. "The Man in the Moon," from 1998's Salad Days is probably the most beautiful song on the compilation, with Belew's voice strong and soaring, all underpinned by a simple classical guitar figure and the subtle string-quartet treatment. Then, unfortunately, Belew decides to close with "Animal Kingdom," the dragging magnum opus of his obsession with animal noises. The track is a 12-minute quasi-African percussive something-or-other thingamajig that smacks of Zappa's ghost. Granted, though, it's pretty fascinating to hear Belew's guitar provide a much-needed voice for the endangered species.

Somehow, Belew's work goes over better when he's wandering all over the musical map like this, paying little heed to continuity or direction. And the element of surprise his guitar playing offers is a quality quickly fading from popular music. But as a songwriter, even after all this time, he's still got a ways to go. And frankly, as formidable a guitar god as the guy can be, why bother with words anymore? I hate to bring another Zappa reference in to all this, but: "Hey Adrian, just shut up and play yer guitar."

-Michael Sandlin