In Brief

** Jackson Browne, “I’m Alive,” Elektra. That pesky “buzz” is circling around Browne’s first album in four years: “Comeback record,” it hums, “a return to form.” Yet the buzz amounts to little more than wishful thinking. Browne has traded in the socially conscious lyrics that dominated his work the past decade for more traditional relationship topics, but it’s still the same blandly sensitive folk-singer fare. New albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent).