You would be hard pressed to come up with a moniker that is more American – albeit unwieldy – than Grant Lee Buffalo, which invokes the names of the North's and the South's Civil War generals and a time when the West was still wild. In its breadth, drama and mythical evocation of America, Mighty Joe Moon, the band's second album, recalls Bob Dylan's John Wesley Harding, The Band and Neil Young's Rust Never Sleeps.

At times spare and acoustic, at times a blistering caterwaul of distorted guitar, the music on Moon distills such seemingly disparate influences as Love, the Byrds, John Lennon and David Bowie circa The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust. But Grant Lee Buffalo never seem retro even as they hark back to a time when America's idealism hadn't been completely overtaken by cynicism, when people still believed that a rock & roll song could really matter.

Grant Lee Phillips, the singer-songwriter-guitarist-visionary behind the group, sings emotionally driving, at times histrionic songs with a voice that ranges from a lush croon to a melodramatic wail to a lilting falsetto. The songs always seem to be about something momentous, even if the free-associative lyrics don't always clue you in to what that is. "Could you learn to read minds/And in the case of mine/Do you read in the dark?" Phillips asks on "Honey Don't Think," a country ballad that Ray Price could have sung.

On the title track of Fuzzy, the group's auspicious 1993 debut, Phillips sings, "We hunger for a bit of faith to replace our fear," and it's clear he still hasn't found what he's looking for. He paints an apocalyptic portrait of a society trapped in cynicism. "Nothing here is any good" is the lie the devil tells him in "Demon Called Deception." In "Happiness" he admits, "The difference in the two of us/Comes down to the way/You rise over things I just put down."

Yet no one who plays music with the conviction of Phillips could believe that there is no hope of redemption. When he quotes "Astral Weeks" in "Drag" ("Sing Van Morrison – 'Would you kizza my eye' "), he's alluding to the lines that follow: "And lay me down/In silence easy/To be born again." When Morrison first sang those lines, it was before the words born again had anything to do with bombing abortion clinics or bashing gays, when sexuality and even rock & roll could make you feel as if you were reborn – the way this album makes you feel. (RS 692)

AL WEISEL