'Lost & Found' is a relentless rock & roll record that's hypercharged with high spirits, if fraught with flaws of overeagerness. The album is unbalanced, with all of the faster songs on one side, and the band sacrifices finesse and detail for reckless thrills. But if Jason and the Scorchers occasionally lose control of the wheel, that's part of the point: Lost & Found is a joy ride that'll leave you hooked on speed.

With a whipcrack drumbeat, Jason and pals dive in feet first with "Last Time Around," playing as if on this, their first full album, they were making their last stand. Guitarist Warner Hodges is the firebrand behind Lost & Found's ferocious drive, performing punk-tempo variations on a whole catalog of Chuck Berry licks. Certain riffs are by now old enough to collect Medicare, but Hodges plays powerfully, and remember, this is a party, not a study hall. If side one of Lost & Found – six smokers, served right down the middle of the plate – doesn't drive you into a honky-tonk frenzy, then you ought to trade in your rock & roll shoes for a pair of loafers.

Like Hodges, singer Jason Ringenberg has limitations that he turns to his advantage. His Southern-fried yelping in "Lost Highway" is an unbridled delight. He sings the penitent words without a shred of remorse – "I'm a rolling stone/All alone and lost/For this life of sin/I have paid the cost" – making sin sound like salvation, profligacy like the only road out of an even more accursed life of boredom. And the band bashes on: Hodges raising great balls of hellfire on the guitar, bassist Jeff Johnson pumping eighth notes till you can feel the calluses, and drummer Perry Baggs banging away with muscular, unrestrained zeal.

Then the Scorchers slow it down for a triad of more reflective numbers. "Still Tied" is an unnerving ballad about a black man for whom the South hasn't changed all that much. "Broken Whiskey Glass," from their first EP, reappears here in a novel arrangement that goes from pensive to rollicking. "Far Behind" is tinted blue with Kenny Lovelace's country fiddle, a nod to their purist C&W roots. Finally, the band calls out to "Change the Tune," contrasting a tough rock guitar with the dulcet tones of a mandolin – and, incidentally, making the point that musical labels don't matter here.

Lost & Found rediscovers the wild, frolicsome feeling that comes when a band of soulful roadhouse roustabouts like Jason and the Scorchers follow their hearts, their instincts and their wandering feet. (RS 445)

PARKE PUTERBAUGH