There is something desperately Messianic about Hothouse Flowers' third album, Songs From the Rain, as if the Irish rockers were straining to reach the same heavenly plain crossed by such holy men as Van Morrison and Bob Dylan. The album is so spiritually correct it squeaks. Thunderous with cheery sermonizing – like a Gaelic chapter of Up With People – Rain ensnares Hothouse Flowers in a muddle. Using every foot-stomping device to break through to commercial viability, the Flowers compromise their greatest gift – musical ingenuity.

Not that the quintet is really eager to be the flavor of the month again. Hothouse Flowers discovered after their 1988 debut, People, that great expectations can kill a band. Heralded as that year's answer to U2, the group raised superstar hopes that withered, an unfair burden for singer-songwriter-keyboardist Liam O'Maonlai, whose hippieish charm hardly mirrored that of the more arenafriendly Bono.

Rain, however, is a strange baptism for a band that should make no apologies for its guileless faith in a higher order. Slickly produced by Stewart Levine, the album is chock-full of barnstormers, from the breathy wail of "Stand Beside Me" to the self-conscious revival meeting "This Is It (Your Soul)." Yet O'Maonlai's fluffy lyrics and guitarist Fiachna O'Braonain's theatrical solos are overzealous. Rain gallops ahead with a grandiosity that tramples the eccentricity and Celtic flavors that characterized the Flowers' previous two albums. Only when the Flowers take a deep breath and relax, as in the gentle lullaby "Your Nature," is the inner beauty of the band resurrected.

Like Simple Minds, another spiritually inspired act that succumbed to bombast, Hothouse Flowers seem unsure how to express their religiosity without alienating a potential new audience. But O'Maonlai and company have stumbled upon the wrong choice for their salvation. Wandering along the white man's road to gospel with no clear sense of direction, Songs From the Rain is full of fire but ultimately devoid of heart. (RS 657)

KARA MANNING