Rabid cult following. Those are three words I dread when describing any recording artist. It usually means the artist in question has been around for a long time, decades in some cases, and most likely had a brush with Top 40 fame at the beginning of his career and has since not fared so well commercially, albeit critics love everything he does. Tied into that is the rabid cult following tenet that the artist in question’s talents have conversely risen in proportion to his lagging sales. And this all leads to the “you can’t say anything about (insert cult artist name here) because he’s a genius and you’re just some asshole who doesn’t understand anything true and beautiful about the world” stance. What this really means is that the rabid cult fan never got over being 14 and drawing horses on his or her notebooks.

But that’s not my problem, especially when it comes to recording artists as enigmatic as Joe Jackson. His first two albums at the turn of the 1980s cast him as a brilliant new-wave songwriter, and he deservedly had hits with classics like “Is She Really Going Out with Him?” and “It’s Different for Girls.” In 1981, he put out “Jumping Jive,” a non-ironic tribute to his favorite jazz/swing/bebop songs from the 1940s and 50s, and from there on, he did whatever he pleased. His next album, 1982’s “Night and Day” gave him the largest commercial success he would ever have as he scored big on MTV with the singles “Steppin’ Out” and “Breaking Us in Two.” I recall not liking the album at the time, thinking it was too jazzy and laidback, but over the years, I’ve learned to recognize the album as his best work.

Since then, he’s been all over the musical map, often returning to his pop roots, but also exploring jazz and, more recently, classical. With the new “Night and Day II,” he seems to be making an effort to bring everything together in an ambitious mix of pop, jazz and classical styles in what sounds like a concept album about city life, New York in particular, with roughly the same urbane feel of the first “Night and Day” album.

Does it work? For the most part, yes, but as a result, it’s hard to pin down what makes this album worth owning. There is a “busyness” to the album that at first annoyed me, but later served it well as the ambient, latin rhythms he uses to fade in and out of most songs serve as a nice underscore to the city feel he wishes to impart. In some cases (like “Hell of a Town” and “Love Got Lost,” which features Marianne Faithfull on vocals), the songs just aren’t quite there--the melodies don’t truly register and the production/rhythms don’t take its place.

But other songs are classic Jackson. “Glamour and Pain” is the album’s best song, recalling snatches of “Steppin’ Out” in its club melody, as it captures that fleeting, “Manhattan at night” mystique that we all long for when we go out on the town, and usually end up sitting next to Jordan Hoffman in a bar in Queens. The “Steppin’ Out" motif, at least those signature piano chords from the song’s opening, appear again on the closing ballad, “Stay” that suggest the sort of melancholy late night/early morning resolution one makes in his cramped apartment after retiring home from sitting next to Jordan Hoffman in a Queens bar that he will find something worthwhile in this crazy city life. Jackson clearly went for that Sinatra “In the Wee Small Hours” vibe and got part of the way there. Also of special note is “Happyland,” a breezy Latin-influenced song about a horrific real-life episode in the Bronx a few years ago when the Happy Land Social Club burned down, killing dozens of people out for an innocent night of dancing who could not escape through the illegal club’s tiny stairwell.

If the whole album worked on this level, I’d give it a glowing review. But in all honesty, his classical-leaning material leaves me cold as it sounds a little too sober, at least in the musical context of the album. Jackson, as demonstrated on “Happy Land,” is swinging for the fences as much as he can, and he deserves respect for that. But I can’t help thinking that as with all pop “geniuses,” be they Ray Davies or Brian Wilson or even Joe Jackson, that they’d be better served by less hushed-tone talk of “genius” and more hard questions about their artistic capabilities. In other words, if one is truly a genius, the last thing in the world that person would want to be called is a genius, and he should be suspect of anyone who calls him as much. So, in this respect, I tip my cap to Joe Jackson, but pull up far short of kissing his feet, or any other body part for that matter.