Brainwashed, the album George Harrison was working on when he died of cancer last year, is out today, a last will and musical testament from the former Beatles guitarist.

"Sometimes I feel like I'm on the wrong planet," Harrison says in an accompanying video distributed to the media by his record company, Capitol Records. Brainwashed is Harrison's final attempt to make sense of that planet. By album's end, he sounds relieved to be departing it.

What he leaves behind are 12 songs that don't sound quite like he had hoped. The guitarist entrusted the album's completion to his son, Dhani, and producer Jeff Lynne. He told them he wanted the songs and guitar playing to be naked - "kind of like demos," says Lynne in a Capitol Records media brief. "He didn't want the album to be posh."

But Lynne apparently couldn't help himself. "I thought if I left them as rough as he would have liked, they wouldn't come over as well. ... So, sorry George."

He should be. To be fair, Brainwashed is a good deal less heavy-handed than Lynne's work on Harrison's previous studio album, Cloud 9, released in 1987. Cloud 9 was hailed as a triumphant comeback, but now it sounds garish, with its artificially inflated drum sound and keyboard-heavy chrome. Only the strength of Harrison's songs redeems it.

On Brainwashed, Lynne more tastefully applies the production lacquer, but pushes Harrison's songs into a bland middle ground that is neither as risky nor exciting as a more stripped-down album might have been. The guitarist settles for a series of mid-tempo folk-rock strummers, tinged by blues and hints of skiffle and English dancehall. His lyrics look expectantly to an afterlife in which the "cloud" that surrounds his mundane human existence will be lifted. In other words, same old George.

There are no new moves, only a reaffirmation of belief: in God and guitars.

"Give me plenty of that gee-tar!" Harrison commands as the album opens, and he gets his wish on "Any Road," which sounds like it would have fit on a third Traveling Wilburys album had Harrison and his cronies Lynne, Tom Petty and Bob Dylan ever gotten around to recording it.

Harrison wasn't a guitar god in the traditional sense, a virtuoso prone to excessive soloing. Instead, as demonstrated on his 1970 classic, All Things Must Pass, and countless Beatles recordings, he was a master of the concise statement, the lyrical fill, the textured accent.

The foundation of Brainwashed is Harrison's arsenal of stringed instruments: acoustic and electric guitars, dobro, ukulele. But a subtle battle between Harrison's desire for intimacy and Lynne's fondness for fussiness makes the album something less than the triumph it could have been. If nothing else, the prospect of a sparsely appointed album built on Harrison's voice and guitars would have been a first for a musician who never quite had enough confidence in his own abilities to lay himself completely bare on record.

The album's most striking track is "Marwa Blues," an instrumental of ravishing beauty, the tremulous tone of Harrison's slide guitar as sweetly expressive as anything he has recorded. Lynne's orchestrations are superfluous, adding sugar and distraction where none is needed. Similarly, "Rising Sun" soars behind a melody that needs no embellishment, but Lynne gussies it up anyway with ersatz strings that sound like they were lifted off an ELO album.

As a lyricist on this album, Harrison remains preoccupied with a quest that has obsessed him since he bonded with the Maharishi in the '60s: transcending the material world. Beneath the album's deceptively serene surface is a struggle to know the unknowable; this is a man who wrote few trifling songs, and he's particularly earnest on Brainwashed. In "Looking for My Life," Harrison suggests that he had to be brought to his knees before he was able to discover what truly matters, calling to mind the near-fatal stabbing he suffered at the hands of a home invader a few years ago.

His spirituality is tinged by humor in "P2 Vatican Blues (Last Saturday Night)," and on the closing title track he adopts a cartoonish voice that suggests the influence of his beloved Monty Python comedy troupe. The song longs to be lifted from a cesspool of earthly vice ("God God God, if we can only stop the rot"), and concludes with Harrison chanting over a tabla beat, tuning in one last time to the healing hum of that mystic radio.

Greg Kot is pop music critic for the Chicago Tribune.

George Harrison

Brainwashed (Capitol Records) **1/2