MECHANICS TINKER WITH PROG-ROCK

“MIKE & THE MECHANICS.” Mike & the Mechanics. Atlantic.

Remember “progressive rock”? Remember the days when lofty idealists dreamed of taking rock beyond its simplistic roots and every minor-league musicologist with a Moog was a regular Mahler or Mozart?

Somewhere along the way, progressive rock stopped being very progressive, and upstart new wavers started squeezing more imaginative sounds out of their synthesizers, and in the midst of it all regressive rock started sounding very, very good.

If you don’t remember progressive rock, it’s probably because most of its original practitioners don’t, either. They’re busy making pop albums like “Mike & the Mechanics,” which retains a little of the quasi-mystical sound of the old music but none of its ambition or vision. It’s a comment not only on the changing nature of the genre, but on the changing purpose of solo albums, that Genesis guitarist Mike Rutherford has taken on a side project not to explore different territory but to make something as salable as possible.

It seems to have worked: “Silent Running” is a fast-rising single. A glimpse of rebels holding out against a totalitarian society, the song has a certain wistfulness, but with its lack of urgency, its setting could be a communist Marin County.

But “Running” works up more tension than the rest of the album, which is indistinguishable from the latest Alan Parsons Project and other like-minded efforts using lush electronic keyboard textures to overinflate standard-brand love songs into something more significant-sounding. Even talented white soul crooner Paul Carrack, undermined by such glitches as a what sounds like a cheap drum machine and a surprising lack of Rutherford’s guitar, can’t breathe much life into anything here.

Meanwhile, does anyone else have a queasy feeling that Syd Barrett is going to resurface with a remake of an old Motown hit?