Down on Lawless Avenue

By JAY COCKS

JACKSON BROWNE: Lives in the Balance (Asylum). Wherein the singer-songwriter does a little housecleaning in his many roomed conscience. The first song, For America, is a deliberate, even self-mocking evocation of a signature Browne anthem, For Everyman, just as the last cut, Black and White, is at once a warning and a sign toward a new direction. "Time running out time running out/ For the fool still asking what his life is about," he sings, and since no one is better at lyrical rock introspection, it is plain that Browne has set himself a new course. This album is its chart, and though there are beautiful songs here, there is no smooth sailing. Each of the eight tunes on Lives in the Balance is about restlessness, rootlessness and desperation, and in one way or another, they are all political. Even the love song In the Shape of a Heart--one of Browne's most beautiful ballads--seems to balance off the weight of a lost affair against the kind of specific moral gravity that can come only from some deeper social commitment. Soldier of Plenty and the title track make glancing observations ("People die for the little things/ A little corn, a little beans") and ask some pointed questions: "I want to know who the men in the shadows are/ I want to hear somebody asking them why/ They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are/ But they're never the ones to fight or to die." This is angry, aggressive songwriting, too deft ever to be dogmatic, too melodic ever to turn strident. Lawless Avenues, co-written with Jorge Calderon and driven home hard by Jim Keltner's full-torque drumming, is the album's centerpiece, a contemporary street epic set in a Southern California barrio, where none of the characters get a chance to dream or a clear shot at a fair shake. It is a truly spectacular song, fired by a heart that is still romantic and forged by a political spirit that will accept no alibis.

THE FABULOUS THUNDERBIRDS: Tuff Enuff (CBS Associated Records). There is a long tradition of honky-tonking in American music that runs way back, considerably before rock, to the blues bars, jazz joints and love parlors where rag and Dixie got going from the turn of the century on. These days, call a group a bar band and you mean they play rock with no fuss and maybe a little sloppiness that can pass for funk. The Fabulous Thunderbirds, who made their first album in 1979 and have opened concerts for the Rolling Stones, still have the true chugalug spirit of a bar band--you can almost hear the beer bottles whistling past their heads during some of the tunes on this rambunctious album--but they also have the musical chops of a top session group and the considerable singing and songwriting talents of Kim Wilson, who also blows a mean blues harp. There is a lot of inbreeding in the T-Birds' music: Zydeco, blues and rock, Keith Richards and Bob Wills. But the sound they tap out of all this is righteous and roughhouse, good enough to get even the bouncers dancing.

THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN: Psychocandy (Reprise). Ever wonder what happened to punk? Under the ministrations of this enterprising quartet from Scotland, it has hooked up to pop, knocked off some riffs from Phil Spector and some heavy guitar feedback from Jimi Hendrix, then gone out slam dancing again. Too goofy to be as nasty as the Sex Pistols, the Jesus and Mary Chain is, however, unlikely to appear anytime soon in concert with Amy Grant. The tunes have suggestive titles (Taste the Floor, Inside Me), but the melodies are sprightly enough for a sock hop, and the lyrics get sunk somewhere beneath the feedback, perhaps for safety's sake. The Chain is one of England's hottest bands at the moment, and this debut album is both cunning and funny enough to raise the temperature a few notches in the colonies as well.

BARBRA STREISAND: The Broadway Album (Columbia). Meanwhile, this current domestic favorite is ensconced right up at the top of the charts, where rock usually dwells. The album opens with spoken warnings by friends about the commercial recklessness of the project, although it remains unclear why anyone thinks that putting the country's premier belter together with a whole lot of show tunes was a dodgy idea. Nevertheless, Streisand hauls off into Stephen Sondheim's Putting It Together, where "the art of making art" becomes a way for the singer to announce her commitment while simultaneously congratulating herself on her courage. Thirteen songs later--after a rafter-battering If I Loved You and the inevitable Send in the Clowns--Streisand polishes off Somewhere while apparently drifting into deep space aboard a synthesizer. It is an appropriate envoi for an album in which each song is delivered with the delicacy of a sonic boom.

ELVIS COSTELLO: King of America (Columbia). Watch out. Streisand may take on Costello next. His lyric wordplay is like a violent-ward version of Sondheim, but--fortunately for all concerned--his estate-bottled vitriol is not conducive to any kind of sentimentalizing. "You're the marshmallow valentine that got stuck on her clothes" is one of his more wistful reflections, and each of the 15 tunes on this new album is a diary of peerless savagery. (Interested parties will also want to pick up a new Costello single, Brand New Hairdo, a song that is not on the album but still seems to be part of it, ( like the sheath for a knife.) Costello's anger can be inner directed, toward a wracked-up heart (Poisoned Rose), or launched outward like a lance into the body politic (like Little Palaces, with its evocation of the "sedated homes of England"), but whatever its course, a Costello song is a cry of urgency and spiritual isolation. This is not his bleakest album either. But it is surely one of his best.