The voice of Christina Amphlett, the Divinyls' lead singer, shuttles between a hiccup, a yodel and a snarl. She sings with inflections that seem entirely her own, as if she were making up a perverse language as she went along. At her most bizarre, she can sound almost demonically possessed.

It's a talent wild enough to enliven any album the Australian singer appears on – including one with the drawbacks of Temperamental, the Divinyls' third U.S. LP. What thwarts the album's potential is Mike Chapman's production. The sound isn't overly slick or corporate, but neither is it as crisply defined as it should be. It's a somewhat remote wall of smudge, compromising the ultimate punch of Mark McEntee's guitar work, not to mention Amphlett's wild-child rants.

Still, the feistiest material and Amphlett's reliably idiosyncratic vocals often triumph. The guitar-dominated music avoids hard-rock clichés at every turn, offering near-art-rock runs in "Temperamental" and country-hoedown flourishes in "Run-a-Way Train." True, some of the material is more serviceable than rousing, but that's where Ms. Amphlett comes in. In "Hey Little Boy" she manages to sound coquettish and lecherous at the same time, and in the heavy blues rocker "Dirty Love" she sings about lusting after a self-loving creep with knowing relish. The latter song best delineates Amphlett's persona: she's the good-bad girl – sort of like all four Shangri-Las rolled into one – with a snatch of preexorcised Linda Blair tossed in.

It's a character that deserves to come through full force. But even if Temperamental's sound hampers that, Christina Amphlett's voice still hangs tough enough to make the trip worth it. (RS 528)

JIM FARBER