On 'Blast Of Silence,' the third Golden Palominos LP, this band of artrock gypsies progresses even further in its quest to fuse aesthetic aspiration and popular appeal. The album is populist in the best sense: it assumes that listeners both deserve and are capable of appreciating vital music that defies categories. It is cult music for the masses.

The band's 1983 debut LP, The Golden Palominos, essentially a collection of catchy rhythm exercises, was the epitome of cult music for a cult. With 1985's Visions of Excess, however, drummer-producer Anton Fier accepted song structure with a vengeance. He also assembled a cast of underground all-stars – including R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, Richard Thompson, Jack Bruce, John Lydon and a host of cronies from the art ghettos of Hoboken, New Jersey, and New York's Lower East Side – to lend its talents. The album could easily have proved a self-indulgent mess. In fact, it brimmed with intelligence and control. The excess was all in the vision; the music itself – which fearlessly incorporated psychedelia, folk rock, punk and scratch mixing – was a model blend of daring and economy.

While not as ambitious as Visions of Excess, Blast of Silence is more accessible and no less enjoyable. The album opens and closes with Lowell George songs ("I've Been the One" and "Brides of Jesus") – an evocation of the Little Feat founder who died in 1979, his own ambitions of reaching a broad audience with music that transcended musical genres unrealized. The dreamy countryish ambiance of these tunes, nicely accented by urban cowgirl Syd Straw's expressive vocals, provides a comfortable wrap for the edgy combination of grim realism and transcendent yearning that characterizes the eight tracks they surround.

Fond as he is of paradoxes and contradictions, Fier successfully marries heaven and hell on Blast of Silence. The folk-rocking "Angels" and the gorgeously textured "Something Becomes Nothing" (co-written and sung by Matthew Sweet) are excursions into the mystic, while "The Push and the Shove," "(Something Else Is) Working Harder" (sung by Jack Bruce), "Work Was New" and "Strong, Simple Silences" (sung by T Bone Burnett) are darker visions touched by evil, informed by the ominous conviction that despite people's best intentions to realize good in the world, "something else is working harder." "Diamond" (written by dB Peter Holsapple) and "Faithless Heart" (co-written and sung by Don Dixon) explore matters of the heart, the lives of lovers, with unsentimental passion – and an undiminished sense of wonder.

Largely due to the subtle instincts of the Palominos' core band – vocalist Syd Straw, guitarists Peter Blegvad and Jody Harris, bassist Chris Stamey, drummer Anton Fier – the tunes on this album sound like startlingly fresh songs that you've somehow known your whole life. A fierce experiment in how fully realized an art form rock & roll music can be, this Blast of Silence will resound in your very soul. (RS 496)

ANTHONY DECURTIS