Robin Lane & the Chartbusters reminds you just how satisfying mainstream rock & roll can be when it's sung and played with intelligence and feeling. Robin Lane has been in and out of the rock marketplace for a decade, and she's built a solid reputation recently in the Boston area with her current lineup. Her debut record sounds fresh and unfettered, but it's also the work of someone who's long ago left behind whatever naiveté she once had. The experiences told and half-told on this album must be common property to most people by now: calmly understated stories about affairs that fail to escape the seesaw of their various neuroses, about chance meetings that sometimes seem like the only real chance left for love, about the sad comedy of being a closet romantic in a terminally wised-up world.

Lane's insights are everyday but not banal. They're delivered with the authority of a lived-in life and the kind of perpetual disillusionment that manages to make way for new illusions. "I thought you were a road sign/So I turned off to the right" is how she describes a random romantic encounter on the highway in "Don't Wait till Tomorrow." Her impulse toward the melodramatic is occasionally a touch insistent–her men seem to run the gamut from the merely mixed up ("Many Years Ago") to the downright psychopathic ("I Don't Want to Know") – but usually the pull toward chaos in her writing is held in check by suspicion and common sense: it's as if Lane were too aware of the price of emotion to give it away very easily. She fills her folkie's voice with so much carefully acquired rock & roll strategy–pushing her singing higher and lower than it ought to go, bending and lengthening phrases to a dirgelike intensity–that in those rare instances when she breaks free and uses her natural register, the moment arrives like a gift.

At their best, Robin Lane's melodies, like her lyrics, tend to be spare and functional, but they're not played that way. Leroy Radcliffe, who's already proved during his term with the Modern Lovers that he's one of the finest journeyman guitarists in rock, stitches stock riffs together into a highly distinctive style that combines the chiming airiness of the early Byrds with Chuck Berry figures modulated to create a delicate filigree of sound. Radcliffe's intricate, evocative work is sympathetically echoed and counterpointed by second guitarist Asa Brebner, another Modern Lovers alumnus. A light, flexible rhythm section holds everything together. Because the Chartbusters never try for more than what they need, they achieve a great deal.

"I guess you'd call him complicated/But who isn't," Lane sings in "Many Years Ago," and though she dresses up the lines a bit by adding "in this world of sinking sand," it's the laconic statement you remember, not the poetic gloss. Robin Lane has a large gift for small truths and an eye for transformations that reveal: e.g., when she suddenly opens herself up for love with a stranger in "Be Mine Tonite" or moves exhilaratingly from pleading to commanding in "Why Do You Tell Lies." Therefore, it should be no surprise that she's even written a convincing dues-paying song, "Waitin' in Line." If nothing else, Robin Lane & the Chartbusters proves that the wait was time well spent. (RS 319)

TOM CARSON