Rock & roll offers no precedent for Nick Lowe. Which isn't to say that Labour of Lust sounds unfamiliar. Quite the opposite. The three-o'clock-in-the-morning strains of "Basing Street," the C&W mournfulness of "Endless Grey Ribbon," the good-natured lasciviousness of "Switch Board Susan," the romantic paradox of "Cruel to Be Kind" — in other words, everything that the Labour of Lust (or, for that matter, last year's Pure Pop for Now People) sessions produced—are as familiar and cozy as your grandmother's quilt. Still, you have to go outside rock & roll — to pop art, to the modern novel maybe—to find anybody who compares to Lowe. Oh, there are plenty of humane ironists, lustful romantics and cheeky genre players making their way through record-company corridors and into recording studios, but Lowe is all of these and more. And it's the more that makes him precedent of rock's not-so-united states.

As both the rock and the pile that Rockpile stands on (partner Dave Edmunds notwithstanding), as Elvis Costello's and formerly Graham Parker's juju man, as an ex-house producer and conceptual genius for the Stiff label, Nick Lowe has had his fingers in a lot of important pies the past few years. But what he does best—and on his own records almost exclusively—is to treat rock & roll as garbage and have it come out a gas. There's nobody who views rock with as much disdain, and it's because of this (not despite this) that he endows it with so much dignity. He takes rock & roll's well-worn absurdities, little conceits and in jokes — you know, the ones your parents laugh at but don't get—and magnifies them until all the details shimmer with grandeur. If Lowe were using a paintbrush, they'd call it conceptual art. Instead, as he said on Pure Pop for Now People, they call it rock.

Labour of Lust, like everything else about Lowe's breezy, what-me-worry style, is a carefully chosen reversal. It does for love songs what Pure Pop for Now People did for pop songs. But the new LP is both more focused thematically and less kinetic. Nick Lowe didn't just love the sound of breaking glass on his first album, he loved the sound of ideas and styles breaking against one another. On Labour of Lust, the cuts seem form-fitted, segueing without hesitation or surprise. The single exception is "You Make Me," the simplest, most direct and therefore most startling song on the record. A perfect antidote to the hilariously romantic VD metaphor of "Dose of You" and the bawdy punning of "Switch Board Susan" ("When I'm with you, girl, I get an extension/And I don't mean Alexander Graham Bell's Invention"), "You Make Me" is Lowe no longer tending to his scrap-irony. Listening to this tune is like discovering that the class wit, who's always seemed invulnerable, can actually cry. And on an LP on which charm, good form and a natural eye are the most obvious virtues, "You Make Me" is a revelation.

Toward the end of side two, Labour of Lust winds down some—in fact, "Without Love," "Born Fighter" and "Love So Fine" are straightforward but stolid, the sort of stuff you'd expect from an archivist like Dave Edmunds, not Nick Lowe. There's nothing wrong with these songs, yet compared to the listing drum rolls of "Big Kick, Plain Scrap" and the yammered yowling of "Cracking Up," they sound tame and secondhand.

The irony is that Edmunds' own album, Repeat When Necessary, is not stolid at all but the kind of carefree rock-appreciation class he's probably been wanting to conduct for some time. Though Edmunds and Lowe make up half of Rockpile (guitarist Billy Bremner and drummer Terry Williams are their first-rate colleagues), both men put the band to quite different uses.

Dave Edmunds is a somber, strait-laced rocker who's been known to mutter when Chuck Berry failed to duplicate his own classic guitar solos onstage. Edmunds' records have always conveyed the impression that he considered it a cruel trick of fate that he was born too late for Sun Studios or Phil Spector. But here, for the first time, Edmunds is no longer obsessed with Xeroxing rock's past. Though the echoes of rockabilly ("Sweet Little Lisa"), Chicago blues ("Bad Is Bad") and honky-tonk ("Queen of Hearts") can still be heard, this artist now seems more concerned with getting the feeling, as well as the form, right. And it makes all the difference in the world, because Repeat When Necessary is an LP that's out to have a good time.

Edmunds has always had an ear for songs (unlike Lowe, he does mostly cover versions), and while Elvis Costello's "Girls Talk" and Graham Parker's "Crawling from the Wreckage" will undoubtedly receive the most attention (both are previously unrecorded), it's masterful miniatures like "The Creature from the Black Lagoon" and "Queen of Hearts" that give Repeat When Necessary its energy and unpretentious spirit. Dave Edmunds isn't as profound a rock & roll antiintellectual as Nick Lowe — and he probably never will be. But it's nice to know he's finally taken the chip off his shoulder. (RS 302)

KIT RACHLIS