To those who felt Marshall Crenshaw's eponymous debut album heralded him as the Great White Hope of the post-Beatles generation. Field Day will disappoint, though not dash, those expectations. For despite the fact that Crenshaw's gift for song craft is still gloriously evident on his second album, the songs themselves tend to suffer from a dogmatically European production approach and lose their identity in a cluttered mix.

The pairing of Crenshaw with British producer Steve Lillywhite was an audacious, probably inadvisable move. Lillywhite's main credits are with U2 and XTC, for whom he creates a busy, layered montage of sound. By contrast, Crenshaw's songs hold up as songs, and all that's called for is a bit of echo on the voice and a spare hand to flip on the tape machine. Though Lillywhite's production values do work here and there–on "For Her Love" and "Try," for example – by and large, they have denied Crenshaw's songs the simple virtues of the singer-guitarist's unvarnished personality. Most every number is fairly drenched in echo and delay, and the tracks wind up sounding blurry–like old photographs of figures in motion.

That shapeless mistiness extends to the mix: hot guitar parts–such as Crenshaw's twangy picking on "One Day with You" and his solo in "Monday Morning Rock"–are set back in a wall of sludge. And the drum sound is nothing short of disastrous. Robert Crenshaw, Marshall's brother, is made to sound like any old technopopper's computer drum machine.

Yet good songwriting will always shine through, and there are plenty of cool tunes on this album. The entire first side, in fact, passes from strength to strength. My favorite is "One More Reason," with a lead-in reminiscent of the Vogues classic "Five O'Clock World" and a bittersweet romanticism not unlike that of Todd Rundgren's windier pop masterworks. The second side is less consistent. "All I Know Right Now" and "Hold It" are the first plain boring songs Crenshaw's ever recorded, and they reveal a streak of mannerism in his writing. But again, the high points are high indeed: "Monday Morning Rock," with lyrics by David Weiss of Was (Not Was), is a sprightly number with a novel point of view (can't wait for the weekend to end, so we can get back to work) that suits Crenshaw, a button-down rocker if ever there was one. Then there's his remake of the Jive Five's "What Time Is It," a counting-the-hours-till-I-see-her song with a chorus calling out the time and drums rumbling like distant thunder.

So Field Day is a good album that could've been a great one. Perhaps Crenshaw will make a no-holds-barred killer on the next try. (RS 398)

PARKE PUTERBAUGH