Ever since "What I Like About You" – with its "Cherry, Cherry" chords, adenoidal delivery and harmonica squall – the Romantics have been a guilty-pleasure source, letting fly with unpretentious, hook-filled music that short-circuits critical justification. With their greasy leather stageskins and nuevo wavo pillowcase pompadours, the Romantics would be a teen-dream parody were the tunes not so relentlessly infectious. As it is, the Romantics are among the most credible exponents of pure American popcraft: definitely a PG band whose salaciousness is a good-natured wink rather than a threatening leer.

It's probably the grinding gearshifts and assembly-line mentality of their native Detroit that gives the Romantics their ironic tensile strength. Their vision owes more to the sounds of young Motown black pop than to the Motor City's screeching metal (Iggy, MC5, Ted Nugent), but the Romantics have assimilated it all. On Rhythm Romance, their fifth album, every track sounds like the sort of upbeat single you want to hear cranked up on a first date. From the soul-stirring opening guitar salvos on "Let's Get Started" to the Motown sound of "Test of Time" to the muffled sweet nuthin's on the title track, the Romantics posit two glorious propositions: 1) Love Is a Rush (they believe in falling – and fast) and 2) It Takes Two (these tunes are not the swaggering brags of young conquistadors; for all their confidence, they are still in wideeyed awe after meeting the girl). The album closer – a rousing proof-of-roots version of Leiber and Stoller's "Poison Ivy" – leaves the band agape in the lush foliage of classic love itch.

Rhythm Romance demonstrates the contemporaneity of popcraft as established by its Sixties progenitors: that the gush of bubblegum puppy love is as good as life ever gets and that, for a rockin' Romantic, there's no better way to say "I love you" than with two guitars, bass and drums. And hooks. (RS 459)

TIM HOLMES