At first, The Feelies' album sounds like the Ventures gone art rock. Then you realize it's the other way around: what this New Jersey-based quartet does is turn art rock back into a skewed version of good-time music.

The Feelies treat rock & roll guitars as pure sound–textures. tones and rhythms to be experimented with, stretched, cantilevered, playfully bent into every possible shape – and Crazy Rhythms reveals a more intricate, volatile musical approach than the group's high-octane live shows. Glenn Mercer's lapidary guitar style, with its loping clusters of flat-picked notes strung like beads on a tune, has certain elements in common with that of Dire Straits' Mark Knopfler, yet it's deployed in a much looser, more inventive way. Mercer's playing is set off against not only Bill Million's rangier leads and fills but a whole panoply of tricky percussion, quick changes and loopy studio effects.

With each instrument (including the witty, throwaway vocals) used as a rhythmic device, there's still no one set beat to a song. Instead, an acoustic intro will suddenly veer madly into furious electric riffing. Lengthy instrumental duels are abruptly dropped without being resolved, while fluid arpeggios emerge out of nowhere to make up a composition's coda. The Feelies know their influences ("Raised Eyebrows," for instance, funnels Brian Eno's "Here Come the Warm Jets" back into the Velvet Underground riff from which it originated), and they delight in novel juxtapositions: e.g., the Robert Fripp-like guitar modulations stuck on top of the staggered neorockabilly beat and irresistible choral hook of "Fa-Cé-La." As if to underline their point, the Feelies' cover version of the Beatles' "Everybody's Got Something to Hide (except Me and My Monkey)" is a nonsense number, and the band dispenses with the melody in favor of yet another churning rhythmic exercise.

In other hands, Crazy Rhythms could have been no more than a dull avant-garde indulgence. But the Feelies' touch is light enough to make their debut one of the airiest, most enjoyable records so far this year. (RS 323)

TOM CARSON