Working in a country that some people fear is turning into one ongoing dance production, the House of Love chooses to be a rock band. On their U.S. majorlabel debut, these four young Britons are already a focused guitar outfit, intolerant of clichés and able to sustain minor-key themes throughout rockers and ballads. Nodding to the purposefulness of U2, the scale of the Smiths and the momentum (if not the machines) of New Order, the band earns its own distinctive response.

The House of Love shuns old-school revivalism. When guitarists Guy Chadwick and Simon Walker do look backward, they dash through some insolent 4/4 like "I Don't Know Why I Love You," which kicks and snarls like the punkiest single of 1978. More often, though, they rely on melodic guitars that sear, strum and shiver; they never jangle for the sake of jangling. The band has its repertoire of styles down cold, but Chadwick songs like "Beatles and the Stones," which remembers Sixties rock as more of a personal than a communal proposition, and the headstrong "32nd Floor" have a lot on their minds. They're emotional collages from young adulthood, when the onset of responsibility and everyday observations – about cars, lovers, corruption, music, news headlines, dreams, what friends say, the weather – dissolve into and furiously complicate one another.

The world looks and sounds serious to Chadwick and to the audience he addresses in his direct, unornamented tenor. Sometimes his songs are more diffuse than necessary; but as The House of Love proceeds, clarity breaks through. On "Blind," Chadwick sings as a young father who doesn't feel fully adult himself; done in an uncompromisingly dramatic and specific way, the song is dead sure of itself yet suspicious of conventional wisdom.

The House of Love is a very British album. But as Chadwick sings in "In a Room," "There's a lesson in the blood/The cold English blood." For this band, that lesson is about consequence – that letting your dreams burn today is one way, maybe, to thrive tomorrow. (RS 581)

JAMES HUNTER