'No Free Lunch' opens with "Keep On Moving," the tale of yet another U.S. male on the road, lighting out for a wilderness free from all emotional connections. What rescues this tune from total immersion in the American myth of the romantic outsider is singer Dan Stuart's gritty willingness to explore the underside of that myth. "Me, I gotta keep on movin'," he brays at the top of the chorus, instantly capping that declamation with a quieter, more disturbing reflection: "I don't think much about what I'm losin'." By the time he confesses "I've got so many fears" – the offhanded despair in his voice evoking Lou Reed – we know why movin' rhymes with losin' and why that lonesome highway holds such allure.

No Free Lunch, Green on Red's major-label debut mini-LP, exploits tense oppositions in its sound as well as in its subjects. The folky reassurance of Chuck "Billy the Kid" Prophet IV's acoustic guitar and the lyricism of Chris Cacavas' piano are set on edge by the jabbing phrases and careening flights of Prophet's electric-guitar leads. Drummer Alex MacNicol (who's since been replaced by Keith Mitchell) and bassist Jack Waterson root the band so deeply that Stuart, Prophet and Cacavas are free to wander and meld such disparate sources as Willie Nelson (whose "Funny How Time Slips Away" is grippingly covered on No Free Lunch), the Velvet Underground, the Rolling Stones, Neil Young and Tom Verlaine into an imaginative tradition that leads convincingly to Green on Red.

So, No Free Lunch moves Green on Red further down the road of the updated country-style realism they established on last year's indie LP Gas Food Lodging, and the results continue to be impressive. Stuart negotiates the contradictions woven into the American social fabric with both daring and sense, looking the death's-head of drugs and violence squarely in the eye (most notably on the chilling "Sister Morphine" borrowing, "Jimmy Boy") and deciding, with eloquent hesitancy, "I guess I want to live." "Gonna get a house one day/Get a wife, raise a family/But that don't mean you have to die," he cheerfully reasons on the album closer, "Time Ain't Nothing." If such sentiments lack the romance of alienation, rest assured that Green on Red knows how to make them real and make them rock. (RS 471)

ANTHONY DECURTIS