If you want to hear great original music without having to buy cheap foreign imports, there's just one place to go: West, young man. Lone Justice is the latest major-label contender on the growing list of left-coast bands who possess a panoramic vision and a thoroughgoing passion for American roots music. The band also has an unassailably original voice in Maria McKee, its sweet-and-sassy singer and main song-writer. Her singing is all over the map, evoking the Southern Comfort-fueled abandon of Janis Joplin, the little-girl drawl of Dolly Parton and the squealing she-bops of Cyndi Lauper. Yet, despite these comparisons, McKee is a unique item, a protean product of a melting pot 3000 miles wide.

The first side of Lone Justice's debut album bears a decided country & western stamp, while the flip reveals their soul roots on a brace of McKee originals. They play throughout with the expert zip of a band with one foot in the bars and the other in the arenas, McKee wailing away with cheerful, indomitable spunk. But the most direct influence on the band's sound is Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Petty's keyboardist Benmont Tench plays on the album as a de facto fifth member of the band, and Petty and guitarist Mike Campbell wrote the single "Ways to Be Wicked," (originally intended for Damn the Torpedoes). Yet even though the Heartbreakers' ringing, anthemic sound flavors some of the songs, Lone Justice strikes out in a lot of directions.

They are equally at home essaying a country-folk paean to the verities of the land ("Pass It On") or laying down a Bo Diddley beat with wall-to-wall acoustic guitars ("East of Eden"). McKee even slips in a verse of old-time gospel on the lowlife's lament "Soap, Soup and Salvation." But my favorite is "Wait 'Til We Get Home," wherein Maria works herself up into an Aretha Franklin-type lather 'cause she's not getting enough respect.

Lone Justice has already built up a furious head of steam on their first album. As Maria McKee gleefully chirps in "Pass It On," "A natural disaster can't hold nothin' on me." She's a tough one, all right, and Lone Justice is a band to watch. (RS 451)

PARKE PUTERBAUGH