Even though it's poorly mixed and you can barely hear the audience's response, Joe Ely's Live Shots–which deftly documents a tumultuous Texan set loose in London – is the best country-music album since Ely's last LP. Down on the Drag. A hoarse howler with a perpetually exhausted, potato-puff face. Joe Ely is a wonderfully loony, charming performer. And Live Shots captures a lot of the go-for-broke power that made his frequent team-ups with the Clash on that English group's American tour last summer seem like a logical alliance.

Here. Ely and his band rip through a set of mostly original honky-tonk rockers. Guitars tend to get reduced to shrill echoes in the mix, but the more exotic instruments – Ponty Bone's jaunty accordion, Lloyd Maines' careening pedal steel–surge up and around Ely's voice with an effortless energy that makes the singer's tales of beat-down romance sound all the more stark and poignant.

Then midway through, Carlene Carter comes in from nowhere to render Hank Williams' "Honky Tonkin'" sexier than it's ever been, and you can hear Joe Ely's cackle of delight in making a country classic subversive once more.

So why isn't MCA releasing this gem domestically?

Alex Chilton – ex-Box Top, star of Big Star, producer of the Cramps – is another American eccentric with a fine import record. Like Flies on Sherbet sounds as if Chilton and some pals broke into a studio late one night, got ditheringly drunk and then played all the songs that floated to the top of their collective consciousness. The result is a small masterpiece of crudity and split-second invention: like Neil Young on Time Fades Away, Chilton achieves his most startling, moving effects at precisely those moments when he seems least in control.

Like Flies on Sherbet is the work of someone who loves rock & roll for its excuse to get explicit. In the extraordinary "My Rival," the singer becomes obsessed with forming a clear image of the guy who's stealing his girlfriend. "He's about five foot five, long blond hair, deep blue eyes," chants Chilton over an ominous white-funk rhythm section, his revenge taking shape in such fervent dreams as "I'm gonna stab him on a rock, shoot him dead with my rifle...." Quavery-voiced and upset, Alex Chilton sounds like a teenager who wishes more than anything else to turn into Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry Callahan, complete with a 44 Magnum for a penis.

While Chilton emotes, musical havoc is wrought. Guitars veer out of tune before your very ears, and the drums invariably crash along for a few extra beats after everyone else has stopped playing. Yet fueled with the bravado of kids too blitzed to know either fear or limits, Alex Chilton and his chums pull off scary, funny versions of songs as stylistically extreme as K.C. and the Sunshine Band's "Boogie Shoes" and Ernest Tubb's "Waltz across Texas."

In other words, Like Flies on Sherbet is as rare and true as rock & roll gets these days. (RS 321)

KEN TUCKER