The Boomtown Rats are one of the hottest acts in England now, and on the surface it's not hard to understand why. Their second album, A Tonic for the Troops (released by Columbia in the U.S., with two cuts recycled from last year's debut LP on Mercury), is an inventive and melodically forceful piece of work, glossily ingratiating all the way. Yet these guys strike me as far too impressed by their own wit to be particularly incisive or convincing musically. They're intelligent, all right, but theirs is a wiseass, off-putting smartness that's clever in the most limiting sense of the word.

As a rock & roll band, the Rats have plenty of talent, especially Johnnie Fingers' keyboard work and the sharp, fluid guitar lines of Garry Roberts and Gerry Cott. But the material is often more interesting to think about than to hear: A Tonic for the Troops is one of those records whose lyric sheet scans a lot better than its songs sound. "(I Never Loved) Eva Braun," for instance, has a wonderful "Leader of the Pack" opening ("Are you really going out with Adolf?" a girl's voice asks breathlessly) and one or two nice lines, yet the overbearingly parodic backup vocals dictate the listener's reaction. Chief songwriter/lead singer Bob Geldof, here as elsewhere, presses the comic point too hard with every arch inflection of his voice. "Living in an Island" purports to be outrageously black-humored about suicide, but trips itself up with overly precious game playing: "... you're a true blue sui-/Side by side they walked into the tide...." It's the kind of joke that was daring and sophisticated in the fourth grade—"Over the Cliff" by Hugo First, and all that.

Almost every cut eventually loses momentum because of overextended lyrical and instrumental showing off. Only "Blind Date" punches through with simple words and concise, unpretentious treatment. The two songs that even remotely deserve the length of their running times—"Rat Race" and "Joey's on the Street Again," a couple of intricate, Bruce Springsteen-like urban narratives—are so stylistically at variance with the rest of the album that they seem to have been recorded by a different band. (Interestingly enough, in these numbers Geldof abandons his preening, Monty Python yelp to slip into a smoldering, "Born to Run" drawl. Commercially at least, he's nobody's fool.) Derivative as these compositions are, they're still the best ones on A Tonic for the Troops. For the rest, the Boomtown Rats would appear to be well on their way to becoming no more than a classy version of the Tubes. And everyone knows that the Tubes' lack of class is almost the only appealing thing about them. (RS 288)

TOM CARSON