Loved
James and Alison Shaw, the brother-sister songwriting team from  Portsmouth, England that's best known as CRANES, are not without pretensions:  They originally planned to makeLoveda double album with half devoted to  a musical interpretation ofThe Flies, the expressionist play by tortured  French novelist Jean Paul Sartre. That plan was shelved (they had to settle for  cover art by French painter Edgar Degas), and instead, their third album  delivers 11 oddly seductive pop songs that mix brutally powerful drumming, a  Cocteau Twins-like wall of shimmering guitars, and the lovable little-girl-on- helium vocals of Alison Shaw.--Jim DeRogatis