Every single song's a keeper

IN the successors to "Diary of a Mod Housewife," the 1997 debut solo album that landed Rigby a spot in the Top 10 of Village Voice's annual pop and jazz critics poll, the Pittsburgh-reared singer-songwriter sometimes seemed to be wrestling with the classic how-do-I-top-that? conundrum.

Her fifth album answers that with a dozen brightly engaging, incessantly tuneful songs without a throwaway in the bunch. Her favorite themes -- resilience in the face of romantic disappointment, a willingness to try, try again and the value of maintaining a sense of humor -- aren't revolutionary, but they're always worth revisiting in hands as skilled as hers.

"Needy Men" puts a bouncy pop-cabaret spin on troubles with the opposite sex, transforming what could have been a whiner into an effervescent singalong. "I Don't Want to Talk About Love No More" is a muscular rocker enumerating everything she'd rather discuss than that dreaded four-letter L word. And she crafts a double-edged paean to '60s pop and '70s punk in the irresistible "Dancing With Joey Ramone."

She includes enough sonic twists to keep her membership in the "alt-" prefix community current, but deep down she remains a direct descendant of the Beatles-Kinks-Byrds pure-pop lineage, with a splash of Jonathan Richman's sardonic innocence to keep the listener on edge.

Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent). The albums are already released unless otherwise noted.