You take on a responsibility, in my opinion, when you put out singles, to eventually come back and compile them for posterity. Posterity, one might counter, may or may not appreciate the gesture, and I'm aware of the structural difficulties posed by the Kantian extrapolation of this idea, which is that everything ever put out should remain in print indefinitely. So here is a compromise: as long as you are alive and working, you are the narrator of your own story, and if you wish to be an honest and respectful narrator (and I think you should wish to be an honest and respectful narrator, but that's a separable argument), you have to keep your story from decomposing. Consolidating and reformatting are, when done with the audience's welfare in mind, laudable ideas, even though in some strict formal sense you are editing, and thus distorting, the record. But letting albums go out of print, abandoning b-sides to history and rearranging your past as if it told some other story to begin with are all deliberate narrative revisionisms, which are destructive not only to the coherency of the dialogue between the storyteller and the audience, but perhaps even more so to the sense of the dialogue within the audience. It is hard enough to talk about art when the art stays the same and the world changes around it; if both are changing, and every discussion has to begin with an arduous recapitulation of what the art is, before we can begin to wonder what it means, then it simply becomes less likely that we will learn anything, and art risks buying mutability at the price of becoming moot.

And for thirty seconds, as "146 Degrees" opens with dry conga-drum patter, misplaced guitar swagger and ominous backing-vocal sighs, I think Disco Volante is going to squander its opportunity after all, but then the real cadence picks up, the strings materialize, a pounding EMF-worthy piano joins in, and the song pushes towards its arching, voyeuristic chorus. The production this time around is a bizarre hybrid. The band, a revolving cast over the course of the singles, has now resolved to Gedge, Murrell, Wedding Present guitarist Simon Cleave and Goya Dress bassist and drummer Terry de Castro and Simon Pearson, and their central parts were recorded by Steve Albini in Chicago in his usual bare-walled manner, but the overdubs (horns, winds, strings, an accordion and some extra vocals) were added afterwards, back in London with Dare Mason. Evidently Albini's contract doesn't have a clause preventing that. It would be my first guess that he hates the result, but the combined effect, to me, is not that different from his recording of Miles Hunt's post-Wonder Stuff trio Vent 414, simultaneously stripped and hopeful. The songs nearly amount to variations on a single theme, more than half of them centered not on the moment in which you make a mistake, but on the moment when you decide whether you're going to or not. "Lollobrigida" (yes to the mistake), a mallety and confused invocation of the Italian actress' glamour, seems slight to me, but "Your Charms" (yes, but ruefully), galloping and giddy, sounds like a frayed Mutton Birds outtake, or the loudest Lucksmiths song ever, and could serve as Cinerama's new signature. The surging "Heels", a flirt's confidant's memoir, never exactly clarifies the narrator's own feelings for the girl, but the slinky "Unzip" (yes), with its slithering falsetto chorus invitations ("Just unzip your inhibitions", the third syllable of "inhibitions" stretched out over three), flips back to the seducer's amoral perspective on infidelity. "Aprés Ski" (yes; the accent aigu is either a mistake or a French joke that goes over my head) is a woman's confession about allowing herself to be seduced ("It didn't mean a thing, it's not embarrassing, it was just disappointing"), the music somewhere between the Cardigans at their darkest and the Manic Street Preachers at their lightest. "Superman" (no) has a waltzing Swedish lilt, but Billy Bragg's sobriety. The sedate, clipped "Let's Pretend" (no) is Gedge's entry in the roll call of songs about giving her stuff back, from the Nails' " Things You Left Behind" to Big Country's "Somebody Else". "Wow" (maybe), Albini mashing the guitar into a tuneless grind but the strings subverting his hostility, comes off like a Vent 414 song daydreaming about Jethro Tull. "Your Time Starts Now" (no), though, the finale, survives unscathed, David and Sally gliding over bare acoustic guitar in parts, subdued strings in others, as close as they come here to Belle and Sebastian or Starlet. But the pop song for the ages, if every album has zero or one of them and I'm the person who chooses, is the cart-wheeling call-and-response volley "Because I'm Beautiful", like a Marine Research remake of "Don't You Want Me", David's character a composite of all the "yes" narrators, Sally's the archetype of all the centers of attention. "Everybody wants to know", she says, "How every party seems to become my show. / They ask me why my life is never dull, / I just say 'Because. / Because I'm beautiful.'" And he says "Oh, I'm sure there's no man you can't pull", and she protests "But that was just a joke", and he counters "I saw his face when you spoke". He claims later to believe her act is unintentional, which it obviously isn't (at least they're both quite aware of it, although awareness and intent aren't synonymous), but I'm inclined to think that they deserve each other, that he's finally realized that she puts herself in the center of attention because she's scared of not having anything to say to herself if she were alone, and that she has tacitly acknowledged that she needs somebody willing to see through her act and yet still pretend to treat her as a trophy. Together they are a couple who actually love each other for their defining flaws, pretending to be a couple who pretend to love each other for their apparent virtues. And similarly, this is a subtle, studious, mature pop album pretending to be a subtle, studious, mature pop album pretending to be glib, noisy and kitsch. We needn't believe, but we ought to be polite enough to act as if we do.

David Bridie was the lead singer in the Australian sextet Not Drowning, Waving, a muted mainstream pop group that developed atmospheric world-music aspirations. The old band was still operating when he and NDW cellist Helen Mountfort started their other sextet, My Friend the Chocolate Cake, an atmospheric acoustic chamber/world-music ensemble with muted mainstream pop aspirations, but after a few years of coexistence (1991-1994, more or less) NDW folded and MFtCC took over. Both groups made eminently soundtrack-friendly music, and Bridie ended up, unsurprisingly, doing a number of soundtracks in various capacities (NDW scored Proof and Hammers, Bridie and NDW compatriot John Phillips did What I Have Written, The Myth of Fingerprints and various TV and theater pieces, and David did In a Savage Land by himself). Act of Free Choice is his first official solo album, but various NDW and MFtCC players participated in one way or another, and while the production style is more insular than NDW and much more studio-centric than MFtCC, the prevailing ambience is fairly similar. As with the Wedding Present, I've consumed the NDW/MFtCC catalogs in large retrospective gulps, and I so far have only a murky idea of how they fit together, but that's enough background for me to make two observations. One is that Act of Free Choice gives David a chance to apply the micro-structures of movie soundtracks to pop songs, so even if the songs are the same kind of music he would have written for NDW or MFtCC, bands will tend to produce arrangements that sound like bands, like several humans interacting, and composers sequestered in home studios will tend to produce arrangements with fewer personalities, with simpler elements because there's nobody to be underutilized. Ensemble interactions are their own justification, and NDW and MFtCC are two particularly compelling examples, but as a solipsist, at heart, I'm reliably fascinated by what happens when a single person takes control of as many variables as possible. It isn't that these drum machines and synthesizers and samples reveal the true souls of these songs, which cellos and violins and basses never glimpsed, but band and solo songs inform each other, showing where execution falls short of inspiration and where it's vice versa. We can pretend that this is how David's songs always sounded in his head, and thus understand better how they had to be adapted for the other players.

It doesn't make any literal sense for an atheist to have holy music, but you can believe in spirituality without thinking it has to derive its authority from anywhere outside ourselves. And if real holy music celebrates the eternal, bigger than life, then it's appropriate that my holiest music, Runrig's Amazing Things, celebrates the eternal that is exactly as big as life, wonder that is endless not because the afterlife is infinite but because the human heart is infinite, even trapped in these bodies.