Nick Lowe, the man who produces Elvis Costello and Graham Parker, is a rising deity on the English pop front. But as you might guess from the title of this LP and its English equivalent (The Jesus of Cool), Lowe replaces Costello's nerved-up sneer with a snicker, and Pure Pop for Now People is a catalog of socko production effects held together with one-shot jokes.

Though much of the music is addictive and winning in the myriad fashions of the Bay City Rollers, Wings, Thin Lizzy or even the latter-day David Bowie, the cover photos give fair warning that what you're holding is a novelty record, an admiring vivisection of other people's hit singles. And the rush of industry-trend seismographers to kiss off punk rock in time to champion Lowe as the messiah of "power pop" shouldn't fool anyone about this album's importance, which is slight.

Nick Lowe first came into earshot as a member of the seminal Brinsley Schwarz band; on Pure Pop for Now People, Lowe's "Heart of the City," with its machine-gun drumming and an unremitting guitar riff from Dave Edmunds, is two quick minutes of the feverish pub rock that won him his nickname of "Basher."

Women, in Lowe's droogishly satirical cosmography, are "meat"—figuratively in "Heart of the City" and literally in "Marie Provost," the melodic and macabre tale of a decomposing silent-film star who is snacked on by her pet dachshund in a Hollywood hotel.

While Lowe affects to be astounded by the crassness of showbiz—"They Called It Rock" and "Music for Money" are diatribes against the music business—he comes off the wall of his alienation so hard and fast that we can only guess at his humanity, not always feel it.

Like most parody/tributes, this record teases with approximations. "(I Love the Sound of) Breaking Glass," for example, yokes its nearly breathtaking attractiveness to a hollow chattiness that finds refuge in sarcasm. Nick Lowe surely has the wit to know that pop-drenched disaffection is a dead end, but it'll be interesting to watch him as he tours America, playing the pawn in the kind of sales schemes he rails against. We might even get to see where his heart is. (RS 266)

FRED SCHRUERS