It's been five years since Julian Cope, the former leader of the Teardrop Explodes, has had a full-length album out in America. Saint Julian reintroduces him as an artist of stature: self-invented, self-assured, ready to take on the world. Given the religious allusions that crop up on this album and Cope's titular sainthood, the words second coming don't seem entirely out of place.

Fully nine of these ten songs hurtle forward with a concise sense of mission and barely containable energy. From the slam-bang chords that open "World Shut Your Mouth" to the bullet-train overdrive of "Pulsar," Cope attacks his material with an almost deranged vigor. He delivers feverish visions about God, death, sex and the universe, with a kind of cosmic giggle underlying it all.

Lifting his gaze above the banality of the day to day, Cope charts a course for the stars. Driven by a surging beat and fistfuls of garage-style power chords, Saint Julian spins you into a state of disorienting ecstasy. You can almost feel the G forces as each song throttles up just a little. By the time you're deep into the second side, with Cope screaming, "Jesus help me, I've got to get out of this atmosphere," you'll feel a little out of breath yourself. But in a sudden reversal of tempo, the album drifts back to earth via "A Crack in the Clouds," an eight-minute parable in which a wandering soul seeks a troubled truce with the world that tries to keep him down.

Some of the imagery is so private that it will be indecipherable to the literal minded. But if you let the music wash over you, the message will come through loud and clear. Updating the flower-punk sound of the late Sixties with a light coat of Eighties studio gloss, Julian Cope has forged a neo-psychedelic synthesis that stands as his strongest musical statement to date. (RS 501)

PARKE PUTERBAUGH