The best thing about John Hiatt is that he really isn't very likable and doesn't even pretend to apologize for it. Most artists would love being called the American Elvis Costello, but when several critics made that claim about Hiatt last year, he retreated behind a stiff-necked scowl and muttered darkly that they were all probably in somebody's pay. This man finds his integrity in the suspicion that everyone's motives, one way or another, are corrupt–and never more so than when people think of themselves as innocent.

After two albums in the singer/songwriter mode, Hiatt rediscovered his rock & roll roots on Slug Line, a bitter, brittle LP that set some faded post cards from his Midwestern adolescence against a hard-edged assessment of his current predicament as an ambitious, struggling performer trying to make sense of today's scene. On Two Bit Monsters, he's entered the modern world completely. What he sees there, not surprisingly, are more opportunities for mistrust.

Though the new record can't boast any one cut as naked as Slug Line's title tune (probably the finest, angriest song about being a journey man rocker since Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Lodi"), it's a stronger album in many ways. Hiatt's in command of a real rock & roll style now. You can hear his assurance in nailing down a Beatles-Byrds lead riff with a driving, punky rhythm guitar; in shooting a raft of organ noise through a loophole in the melody; in sinking an R&B bass line into the corner pocket. John Hiatt has always had a tricky, abrupt sense of language, spiked with internal rhymes and unexpected reversals. But here he's come up with rhythms to match. And his tight, twisting melodies give added presence to his high, keening, nasal voice–a voice as deliberately uningratiating as it is unforgettable.

Two Bit Monsters opens with the pulsing "Back to Normal," a taunting hello to a reality that's turned both menacing and insane: "Who's that in the shadows on the wall/Who's that with the camera in the hall ... /I'm back to normal." The LP then moves through a landscape rife with broken connections, paranoia overtaken by events, and small acts of violence that are like campy mid-Sixties TV police shows performed with real bullets. "String Pull Job" changes romance into a game played between carnies and marks, while "Cop Party" serves notice that if fascism ever comes to America, it's going to look as merry as a drunken company picnic. "I Spy (for the FBI)" – the record's one cover version, and quite a discovery–links sexual betrayal with political treachery, camera-eye voyeurism with espionage. Hiatt's X-ray vision recognizes that the song's jokey idea is no longer a joke anymore.

Because he's got a fairly complex and far-from-pleasant view of his country and its culture. Hiatt is a rarity among U.S. rock & rollers. If this sometimes leads him into powerful but overblown diatribes like "Face the Nation," it also gives him Two Bit Monsters' best number, "Back to War." Here, the metaphor works equally well for a love affair, the singer's state of mind and the world at large, all lashed together by the grim chorus: "That's what we're here for."

John Hiatt is one of the most arresting and talented young musicians in America. Long overdue for success, he'll probably find plenty of reasons not to enjoy it if it ever arrives. (RS 327)

TOM CARSON