In the entire history of rock & roll, there has never been a tune quite like "Ladies and Gentleman," one of 17 originals on Jack Logan's sophomore effort, Mood Elevator. Atop a brisk Ramones-ish backbeat, Logan sets the scene in the opening verse: "He strode to the podium with a stern face/A nervous calm fell all over the place." The chorus quotes the speaker's request: "Give me your attention." The second verse adds more details: The man clears his throat; a "colicky baby" cries.

Nothing of any consequence actually happens. We never learn the content of the big announcement. But we know plenty about the feeling in the room. With impressively few words and four craftily deployed chords, Logan thaws a freeze-frame moment, finding within it a palpable sense of anticipation. There's no narrative, no underlying moral message. The story, such as it is, doesn't really make sense. But it's impossible not to be curious as Logan transforms an everyday occurrence into a moment of tense drama.

That's the mark of a master storyteller and just one of the reasons to give a bit of your attention to Logan, the 36-year-old swimming-pool-motor mechanic from Winder, Ga., whose debut, 1994's Bulk, was a daunting, diverse two-disc collection of homemade demos. This time, Logan and his co-writers recorded the songs all at once in a makeshift studio. The sound is uniform, and the styles fall more consistently within the rock & roll canon.

But the frazzled, fragmented yarns are pure, unrefined, 100-proof magic, the work of an eccentric novelist who just happens to prefer shorthand. Not since early Springsteen has an artist drawn such riveting pictures of people caught in circumstances they never anticipated. But where Springsteen was passionate about changing those circumstances, Logan simply describes them. There's the woman recovering from a devastating fire in "What Was Burned" who can hardly be comforted by Logan's somber analysis, sung in a syrup-slow drawl: "Some faulty wiring has left you desiring ... what was burned." There's the character of "My New Town" who smells the paper mill and is overcome with regret about relocation. His story begins with a line, "It's bad enough that I now have to live here," designed to sum up his lot and simultaneously inspire pity. There's the grease monkey of "Vintage Man" who compares himself to his classic wheels: "From a certain distance I don't look such a mess, though after a while, I need to stop and rest." There's the couplet that closes the album – "Selling the business in dreamland/I'm getting liquid again" – that begs for short-story elaboration. Of course, none is offered.

Regardless of the subject matter, even when Logan spends an entire song contemplating the doors of an old Lincoln (the anthemic "Suicide Doors"), he makes the most insignificant stuff seem poignant – a contrast to recent Springsteen, whose droning Gbost of Tom Joad is full of right-thinking, socially relevant messages that rarely resonate as stories. Part of the credit goes to Logan's agile supporting cast: On brutally blunt rockers like "Neon Tombstone" and tightly focused ballads like "Bleed," guitarist Dave Philips, pianist and guitarist Kelly Keneipp, and the band's rhythm section of Eric Sales and Aaron Phillips find musical corollaries for each of Logan's moods, contributing raw power or aching single-note guitar wails as necessary, translating the writerly stuff into terse, gut-level three-minute masterpieces. (RS 726)

TOM MOON