If you didn't know about Marvin Gaye's divorce, one look at the cover of Here, My Dear would be enough to guess the plot of this home-movie soap. Fake Rodin love sculptures litter a Greco-Roman courtyard bounded by two plaques, one inscribed "Love and Marriage," the other "Pain and Divorce." In front stands Marvin himself, a bogus Socrates gone toga party, inviting us to drink from his own very bitter cup. Pretentious is too good a word for this clutter. What happened to the sharp eye responsible for the exhilarating blur—Gaye's red knit cap as soul icon—of the Let's Get It On cover?

Gaye is no stranger to bad taste—remember the "sex voices" in "You Sure Love To Ball" or the mercury-tunafish line in "Mercy, Mercy Me"? But Here, My Dear goes somewhat beyond or below these small outrages. The spoken intro makes it clear that this record is not only dedicated to Anna Gaye but given to her as well, literally, as alimony. And the songs' excessive length and, in one case, repetition in "versions," lead one to suspect Gaye of padding his material to double-album length for double-album prices.

Fortunately the music isn't as shoddy as the packaging or the "concept." It finds a gentle groove early on and rarely deviates except for an excursion in light swing called "Sparrow," which wavers nicely into a choral overdub at the end, the record's tastiest moment. Otherwise, this material is so nondescript that after more than a dozen listens, I still have trouble recalling any lyrics or more than a few melodic lines.

And even these few hooks seem no more than tired remakes cloned from Gaye's earlier hits anyway. The vaguely pretty "I Met a Little Girl," a five-minute chronology of the Gayes' courtship and marriage, resembles "Distant Lover" (on Let's Get It On) but lacks distinguishing features, such as the latter's subliminal pulsating wah-wah. "Anna's Song," a light blue-moody chant, is a ghost of "Trouble Man." Still, this is Gaye's most sincere performance on the album, as might be expected. The meandering convolutions of "When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You" might seem inventive if Gaye's singing wasn't so depressed….

As for the subject matter, public airing of this sort of dirty laundry is not unheard of in pop. Leonard Cohen has made a career of it. Lou Reed's seminal Berlin is a blunt, despairing narrative of a dying marriage. But these two have the courage of some ruthless self-dissection, by turns apologetic and accusatory, self-pitying and self-congratulatory, Gaye is too involved in justifications to tell us anything real about marriage. This is especially distressing because Let's Get It On is one of the best (one of the only!) albums about "pure" sex ever made….

Gaye's ambitions—and he is very ambitious; he once compared his music to Beethoven's—are mostly musical anyway. Heir to the smooth style of Sam Cooke, Gaye also sings with enough hard gospel grit to make him something more enduring than the entertainer he was born to be…. It would be hard to deny that he has sold at least part of his soul to the devil though, what with the rip-off Trouble Man, the execrable I Want You, and this latest inflated teardrop.

So Marvin Gaye is a man of contradictions—the best kind, usually. And he has carried these contradictions to the heart of his great music. While What's Going On gave slick class to social realism, Let's Get It On, the modern make-out manual, can be rough going for the casual listener. From the grating "ugly" opening to the sweet, string quartet severity of "Just To Keep You Satisfied," Gaye demonstrated uncompromising good taste along with the occasional bad as an independent composer and producer.

Here, My Dear notwithstanding, Gaye is too valuable and too shrewd (for all his aggressive innocence) to write off…. If next time he moves like he means it too, don't be surprised—born-again is second nature for an old soul.