Touted by yet another new label as yet another "return to form," Bob Mould [ tickets ]'s Anti debut finds the ex-Husker Du frontman once again straddling the line between past performance and future expectations.

It's a tightrope that Mould walks quite nicely for most of "District Line," an album that's less self-consciously a retreat to pop-rock of the old school than his previous effort, 2005's "Body of Song." Mould seemed uncomfortable in picking up his popularist paintbrush on that disc, perhaps because much of it was originally conceived and written while Mould was still deeply into his electronic dance phase, an affect carried over from 2002's explicitly techno "Modulate."

Here, paired again with Fugazi drummer Brendan Canty, Mould sounds back at home and in his preferred modus on the album's first two tracks, the driving "Stupid Now" and the pleading "Who Needs to Dream?" The following track, "Again and Again," is right in Mould's wheelhouse and could have dropped right off one of his '90s-era records, with its delicately intense building chorus, and resolution via yelps and extended guitar workout.

By the time Mould gets off the floor for "Old Highs, New Lows," he's back in the rocking chair, striking the same uncomfortable balance between old and new technologies that has marked his career in recent years. The song is essentially a power ballad with synths, with the album's first significant (but unfortunately not last) vocoder appearance, an instrument that Mould has overused on his recent work to a depressing degree.

"Return to Dust" shakes off the previous track's cobwebs, with a ferocious attack that recalls Sugar on "Copper Blue," but the Bob Mould who made that record never would have pulled his punches by dropping a leaden lullaby-with-robot-voice section smack in the middle of the song, yanking the reigns on the track and ripping much of its crunching power away in the process.

The remainder of the album goes back and forth in a similar manner, evoking many of Mould's classic musical stances, but never committing to any of them or offering much of anything new looking forward. It's all whiplash-inducing style freaks that seem designed mostly so as not to alienate or alarm either old fans or newer ones.

"District Line" is a strong effort, and clearly an improvement over the uncertain "Body of Song" in many ways, but in the end it suggests a somewhat disturbing possibility: that Bob Mould is trapped inside his own musical history, unable to find his way out.