The curls are slicked back, and the man’s strapped to impress. The first four tracks are a suite of sorts: leadoff “Christopher Tracy’s Parade” begins with a stirring horns-and-woodwinds arrangement, “New Position” builds a funk jam around a steel pan, and the cod-ESL of “I Wonder U” is his first album track led by another vocalist (Wendy Melvoin). But after the galleries of previous years, this can’t help but seem like a shelf of miniatures. Things pick up in the second half, though: “Mountains” has a rollicking, advancing groove with a laconic horn chart that surely owes something to prime Mike Jackson; it’s the best song on the record. The deathless “Kiss” is all dry punch and tiptoe groove, and though ten million replays may have stayed its force, it still boasts some great couplets and one of his tightest vocals. “Sometimes It Snows In April” closes things out with a piano elegy, a sensitive, languid performance that loses a little shine when you remember he’s singing to the character he played in Under The Cherry Moon, for which this record served as the soundtrack.

The film’s French setting reveals itself here and there: in “I Wonder U,” in the cod-chanson of “Do U Lie?”; its nature as a period piece crops up in “Under The Cherry Moon,” which marries a beguiling gondola-paddle of a melody with distracting drum cutoff. There’s even an instrumental interlude, the featherweight “Venus De Milo.” It’s one one-thousandth the tune that P.M. Dawn’s Prince-inspired “Downtown Venus” is, that’s for certain. Had this album, and that film, come out today, I can’t even imagine what the Internet would do. This being 1986, all Prince had to do was dust himself off and drop another masterpiece.