Seattle's Mudhoney has been a buzz band almost from its inception after the collapse of Green River in 1988. The group's brilliant early records on the Sub Pop label mine a peculiar tension between sexual longing and a disgust with the possibility that longing might be realized. That dynamic maps itself out musically as a discomfort with typical male rock attitudes.

On those indie records, Mark Arm, the band's lead singer, guitarist and frontman, always sounds as though he's surprised and a little upset to find that he has somehow gained the cultural authority to deliver songs about the glories of sex, drugs and slutty women from the point of view of a newly slutty man. This buoyant hard-rock innocence may have defined the much-vaunted Seattle scene more truly than Kurt Cobain's anarcho-nihilism or the bumptious posturings of Soundgarden.

Piece of Cake, Mudhoney's new record, finds the band members sounding more like the rock roués they have always thought they should be but never should have become. At its worst (as on "Blinding Sun" or "When in Rome"), the album dishes up idiomatic hard rock so mannered that it hardly sounds like rock at all, but rather a prepackaged collection of amp, fuzz-tone and reverb settings – complete with accompanying attitudes – that are supposed to go along with being a Real Rock Dude With a Big, er, Contract.

Which is not to say that Piece of Cake is irredeemable. When Arm and company hit it, as on "Living Wreck," "Make It Now" and the single "Suck You Dry," they go a long way toward making their new-found blues-metal vocabulary their own. But most of the record skitters between competent reworkings of the band's signature Stooges-meet-Blue Cheer sound and formulaic rock & role-playing that nobody, least of all Mudhoney, believes in anymore. As the band itself says on "Acetone": "Oh, lord, what have we become/We're not fooling anyone." (RS 647)

TRENT HILL